What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

[mockingbird]

It's always the same story with these drives. The tray won't open.

I've re-capped a few of these, with the end result being that the tray still won't open, the EEPROM is corrupt, or the drive won't read discs anymore. I had the last thing happen to me today. I thought I'd tweak the laser pot a little, I think I destroyed it when I turned it, because I wasn't getting any resistance reading off it at all after that.

It's always the same LELON caps. And replacements are expensive too because they're always ultra-miniature and rare. LG drives have a much better chance of repair in my opinion, but it's a shame that LG is rubbish (Panasonic chipset).

How about an LG quality drive with Mediatek logic?

[c_hegge]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Yup. I've seen plenty of Lite-on DVD drives with jammed trays. I can usually get them open by using the paperclip elect hole after pressing eject, though.

LG drives aren't that bad IMO at all. I usually use Samsung DVD drives in new PCs, though.

[lti]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I had a Lite-On drive that would flash the activity LED for a long time after pressing the eject button, then open the tray halfway and close it again. If the tray stayed open long enough to insert a disc, the spindle motor was noisy and it wouldn't read the disc. Recapping fixed it. These were the caps it had:
http://capacitor.web.fc2.com/l_other.html#l
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...2&postcount=75
There were also some G-Luxon caps, but they were still good. The bad caps were filtering the 5V input and the output of a 3.3V regulator.

I still have a dead LG CD-ROM drive with Mediatek logic. It lasted 10 years.

[Compgeke]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I've found a lot of the Samsung DVD-ROMs in the Optiplex GX200 series don't like to open when the tower's sitting vertically. Flipping it down where it's sitting flat solves the issue though. When this happens the drive's usually completely full of dust but I've never tried cleaning them - not worth the effort.

Haven't seen many Lite-On drives lately, maybe because they were all replaced by this point.

[c_hegge]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

^
I've noticed that too, although I'm pretty sure I've seen it with LG/HL Data Storage and Sony/Optiarc DVD drives in Dells too.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I guess it depends on the region they are sold in - i've had Lite-On drives outlast anything else. I have two, one i bought new, one used. Both bought more than 6 years ago. Both will still read and write anything you toss at 'em.

LG drives have been the most troublesome for me, with Asus and Toshiba following.

As far as laptop drives go though, i've found that all brands failed. In my old DV9000 i went thru 4 optical drives. The drive in my current DV9000 no longer writes CDs properly, and the Acer 5742G is on its 2nd ODD too, since last year.

What annoys me is that i hardly use them anymore, and when i rarely need to burn a disc, i found that the #!*% thing has crapped itself from sitting there doing nothing.

[lti]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I've found a lot of the Samsung DVD-ROMs in the Optiplex GX200 series don't like to open when the tower's sitting vertically.

I have one of those. I have to open it with the emergency eject hole, but that doesn't matter since I have only found two discs it can read.

LG drives have been the most troublesome for me, with Asus and Toshiba following.

The worst drives I've had were Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.

What annoys me is that i hardly use them anymore, and when i rarely need to burn a disc, i found that the #!*% thing has crapped itself from sitting there doing nothing.

That's how most of my drives have died. There were two (the LG and the Lite-On I mentioned above) that failed after heavy use.

I wonder if the old DVD recorder I have sitting around that won't record has bad caps. It uses a modified Lite-On IDE DVD burner with Teapo and CapXon caps, along with two Sanyo OS-CON caps filtering the 5V input.

[BigTroll]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

lol my girlfriends pc had a lite on combo drive you just hit the top of the pc after you press the button and it opens.

[kc8adu]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

dont forget the ones where the glue leaches out of the felt ring on the spindle.
they stick shut.takes several attempts to eject.

[rhomanski]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Wow, I must be lucky. I've never had one fail for me.
Of course at less than twenty dollars, I'd probably replace it rather than try to fix it, if one did.

[Almighty1]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Speaking about DVD-ROM or DVD Writers, I noticed both the Pioneer Slot Load DVD-305S SCSI and the Hitachi-LG External USB DVD Rewriters both seem to auto eject, anyone knows what causes this and how it can be fixed? The later one is weird since if you put in a disc, it will stay shut and read the disc fine.

[cheapie]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I've only ever had one Lite-On drive die on me out of the over 10 I've had. It started sticking shut, then stopped burning discs, and eventually stopped reading them.

As for Hitachi-LG (HL-DT-ST), on the other hand, I've had at least three so far randomly stop working. It's usually when I burn several discs in a row - they'll start out fine, then give a "Track Following Error" partway through one of the discs (causing the burn to fail), and never read or write that kind of disc ever again.

I've also seen two "JLMS" drives, both DVD+-RW. One worked perfectly, and the other one had a very noisy and occasionally unreliable tray mechanism but read/wrote fine.

I've had two Samsung CD-RW drives, one worked fine, but the other one got more and more reluctant to burn each time I used it.

I currently have five optical drives. My computer has a Pioneer BDR-209DBK BD-RE drive. My sister's computer has an ASUS DRW-24B1ST DVD+-RW drive (rebranded Lite-On iHAS324 (rev. c, unfortunately)), which I got for $20. My Mom's laptop has some kind of HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW drive. I also have a Pioneer DVR-112DBK DVD+-RW drive and an old Mitsumi CDR-273 4x CD-ROM drive from 1995 in my junk box. All of these drives work fine, and the Mitsumi will even reliably read CD-Rs and occasionally read CD-RWs, despite predating the CD-RW standard.

[Jonny Accelerant]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

SONY.

Never had a problem with a Sony anything. Even my BenQ turned out to be a POS.

[Almighty1]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Plextor used to be good when they made their own drives. I think the Plextor I have that failed is a rebadged Lite-On. Sony has it's share of problems as it's the only drive that can't read White Book aka VideoCD's correctly. After I moved to this house in June 2009, due to the moisture, it seems like many drives had died on it's own for no reason. The Plextor FireWire/USB External Drive isn't able to read discs so I replaced it with the External LG DVD ReWriter which is a Hitachi-LG drive and ofcourse that one developed the auto-open as soon as the drawer is closed unless I put in a disc. Then there is the LG Combo DVD-+RW/VHS VCR, which also had a drive that died so replaced it with another EIDE Hitachi-LG DVD-+RW drive in 2010 and it seems fine so far.

[shovenose]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Funny! My experience with optical drives is entirely different. I've used Lite-On drives exclusively in my home and office computers (and the occasional server) and client builds and have had 0 failures. Some of the drives get used heavily, some of them pretty much never.

It's Samsung drives that like to get stuck in my experience. Don't know about the rest since at work I mainly deal with 4+ yr old OEM computers. they usually have HL drives.

[yyonline]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Some lite-on drives use a magnet in the tray mechanism to clamp the disc to the spindle. The tray motor loses stength over time and can't overcome the magnet's clamping force to eject the tray. I've found that replacing the tray motor in a stuck shut lite-on drive will usually resolve the issue of it not ejecting. I used to use tray motors from old CD-ROM drives I had in a parts pile to repair newer lite-on DVD burners, with decent success rates. Some of those older CD-ROM drives had very torquey little tray motors, though most of them eject the tray very slowly compared to newer drives. I don't really bother repairing them anymore since a new drive is around $20 these days.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I had a LiteOn SOHR-5239V CD drive and it was a POS!!

It randomly stops in the middle of reading and causes Windows XP text mode setup to fail with a file error.

And another time, it randomly disappeared when nLite was scanning a CD and caused an I/O error pop-up.

Then another time, when reinstalling Windows, (probably XP) it randomly stopped again and
caused the text mode setup program to give error message "Setup cannot copy the file: town.mid"

WTF!

[mockingbird]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

Well, I just had a good experience with a 2008-era DH20A4H that came back from the field after the customer gave me their old computer after I sold them a new one. The drive must have only been used by me to install the OS and then never again all these years because it was pristine inside.

The PCB is the same as the dead DH20A4P that caused me to start this thread, except for one additional connector and cable. The other PCB has the silkscreen for the four pin connector but it's not populated.

The DH20A4H had Evercon caps though and not Lelon like the DH20A4P so I did a preemptive re-cap. You need ultra-miniature 16v 220 and 6.3v or 10v 220 caps for these boards.

Drive is purring like a kitten. Flashed with codeguys firmware.

[dood]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

I had a LiteOn SOHR-5239V CD drive and it was a POS!!

It randomly stops in the middle of reading and causes Windows XP text mode setup to fail with a file error.

And another time, it randomly disappeared when nLite was scanning a CD and caused an I/O error pop-up.

Then another time, when reinstalling Windows, (probably XP) it randomly stopped again and
caused the text mode setup program to give error message "Setup cannot copy the file: town.mid"

WTF!

Funny... that .mid file is still present in Windows 7 (Edit- And Windows 8; just checked). http://www.thewindowsclub.com/the-my...s-in-windows-7

[BigTroll]

Re: What is it with Lite-ON Drives?

speaking of lite on I bought this last week, so far so good, as more and more computers don't have cd drives or internal ones that go bad i just plug in this baby and iam good to go.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106104