Intermittent & Other Burn Failures - Possible Cause

I've noticed on this and other groups that it is fairly common to experience
a whole string of failed burns to DVD's on makes that previously worked ok.

Well, I've been doing some experimenting and found a cause that I haven't
seen posted anywhere before.

My setup is a Sony DW-U10a and I use Mirror 2x DVD-R's and Memorex 4x
DVD-R's.

The Memorex has proven very reliable with no coasters at all. However, the
cheaper Mirror brand has shown the occasional failure and sometimes a whole
string of disks have failed in a row. It is easy to assume that the disk
that have failed are due to manufacturing faults, and I'm sure that at least
some of the failed burns are caused by this. But I believe there is another
cause as shown below:

My DVD writer is positioned in the second drive bay from the top. The top
bay has a hard drive caddy which is used with a 40gb IBM 7200rpm drive. Some
IBM drives are known to run hotter that they should and mine is such a one.
After some time I noticed that I never had a burn failures when that hard
drive caddy was empty but only when the computer had been switched on for a
while and the caddy had the IBM drive in it. Again, only the Mirror brand
ever failed while the Memorex never did.

I came to the conclusion that the Mirror brand were sensitive to the
increase in temperature while the Memorex were not. Since finding this out
and taking steps to prevent overheating I haven't had any failures with the
Mirror brand.

If it happens to the Mirror brand then I think one can be sure that other
brands would also be susceptible to overheating too. So if you are
experiencing burn problems similar to the above, try moving the drive away
from any components that are running hot, selecting a low drive bay position
(generally, the hottest part of the computer is the top drive bay), or put
in an extra fan, etc.

Paul D Moore.