Bob said:
Until it breaks. Look up MTBF on the manufacturers website for this model.
The DVD drive should be minimally affected by that much
viewing - it will lose its ability to burn long before
it loses its ability to read.
I am on the third DVD burner (a Plextor) for my home system.
I use it for backups onto DVD-RW about every second day
and I also occasionally burn a DVD-R full of pics, mp3s,
mpegs, or whatever. My first two DVD burners (one Sony,
one Plextor) lasted about 10 months each. The first
one - the Sony - could not do RW so I was backing up to
-R discs at that time.
Plextor replaced my second DVD burner for me, but Sony
would not replace the first one. Sony said that much
burning was "abusive" and they would not honour their
warranty - so I'll never buy another Sony product again.
My concerns are more with the costs of the media than
the cost of occasionally replacing the drives. I find
that I am lucky to be able to reuse a DVD-RW twenty
times before I start to get errors when writing to it.
Elsewhere I occasionally use a drive made by LG and I
find that RW disc lifetimes are about the same with that
burner. El-cheapo brand discs last a third that long.
By contrast, I know someone else who was an early
adopter of DVD-RAM. He fills eight to ten DVD-RAM
discs daily at his video-editting business as temporary
backups of customer data until he is done with that
customer and can reuse those discs for the next
customer. His first Panasonic DVD-RAM drive still
works fine and his first DVD-RAM discs still work fine
even though they has been rewritten several hundred times.
Because of that and other anecdotal evidence like that,
I plan to get a DVD-RAM capable drive the next time around
and use that for my backups and only use DVD+-R or DVD+-RW
when I need compatibility with drives that can't handle
DVD-RAM.
