Do you own a cd burner ? You like to create SVCD's Like i do? Let's hope you have more luck than me with your burner. Because today I was told that my 23 month old CD burner Yamaha 4416S is about to die.. (!!!). But read the whole story.

23 months ago I brought a Yamaha 4416S:

* 4x write
* 4x re-write
* 16x read
* SCSI-2 Interface, 2MB buffer, 160ms access time..

Good performance..good technical data.. Ok, the Yamaha 4416S was more expensive than other brands but I prefer to get quality. I selected this burner since I have heard of several problems with no-name devices and therefore I selected this Yamaha burner. It's connected to an Adaptec 2940UW, so a good team to last... well. Last till about 8 weeks ago.

I brought a bunch of Platinum CD-R's, blank cheap CD's, they worked fine till than. So I brought 50 of them. I started burning the first one.. ups. After a few minutes Nero reported a "servo track failture". Hm, whatever that means.. CD-R to hell, I tried CD-RW - no, that one works. Strange ! He does not like the Platinum CD-R's anymore !? May I should not touch anything during burning..same result. Reboot a cold machine.. same shit happens. For me it was clear: The CD-R's are not ok ! A test with Traxdata CD-R's was successful, too.

I continued burning my SVCD's on CD-RW. But.. strange.. sometimes he does not like them either. I got a litte worried..anyhow. Well, may some strange combination of bufferunderrun, CPU load...!?..

About 2 weeks ago I brought Kodak CD-R's and some Traxdata 80min. Yeah, let's go for quality, and the burner liked them in the past. SHIT !!! Again, some strange error, first 80min- Traxdata CD-R to hell. My head started to get red..what the hell..

About a week ago..guess what - CD-RW malfunction. I couldn't believe it. CD-RW now !? This works always before !

No chance, this seems to be a problem of the hardware. Must be dust on the lens or so, since this Yamaha 4416S is used in a private machine every while and than. Hm.. So i try to get support from Yamaha.

I tried to call 00800-92 62 42 22, Yamaha Support for Germany/Europe...

Do you need to work for you money during daytime !? I need to.. and I don't have a complete day to hang out on the telephone hotline to wait! If this is the case for you - better do not call this number. I spend 15 min on the phone, no chance to reach a human being instead of this nice computer girl. Fine ! So I deceided to retry the dial but I choose english.. hey ! Classic music now, but no women voice.. doesn't matter, I was kicked out of the line after 8min.

This is not what I expect from a user support / hotline ! Ah, don't worry. I checked the homepage, found a form where I could enter my problem, press send.. ups. I forgot to enter a a faxnumber, so the from reminded me that i must enter a valid email adress. What a small problem this was after all ;-)

OK, today, the 04.12.2000, I finally reached a friendly man at 00800-92 62 42 22 (this time i was prepared; I used the speaker and read the newspaper during the "waiting time").

About 12 min later I was connected to a human being. I described the error: Burner does not like CD-R at all, sometimes CD-RW's, too. For him this information was already sufficient, yes, this is "normal"..the laser is at the end of his life time (!!) and need to be exchanged. WHAT ? End of life time after 23 months of rare private use ? Our company burners came into my mind; they burn about 150-200 CD's *per week*, so if we would have used Yamaha 4416S drives we would receive new devices once a month and that's normal or what ?... Good luck - we use Plextor Professional CD-Writers instead. Now guess why plextor have 4 years of warranty ?..

I answered the tech support man that I am a little, just a little angry about this fact and I like to get a telefon / fax number where I can express my disagreement to this fact that a 4416S dies after 23 months and i need to pay the repair. He helped me and I asked how much it would be if i deceided to repair the burner. Take a look at this !!!

* 130 Euro (260 DM) repair cost
* ~13 Euro (~26DM) for sending the device to Belgum from Germany
* ~10 Euro (~20DM) for money transfer to Belgium from Germany
___________________________________________________

= 152 Euro (304DM) repair cost to exchange the laser !

What a joke. It's only a 4x/4x/16x burner; I could get a brand-new 4/4/24 burner from Mitsumi for 255 DM / 127 Euro, a TEAC 4/4/32 for DM 265 and so on..

My conclusion for this story: Check how much guarantee you get for you preferred device; buy whatever you like to because as you have seen a brand name is *not* a guarantee for better quality (or service or customer support) or buy a product where the manufacturer is sure that he has an outstanding quality.

Yamaha will receive a description of this story via fax and I will ask them to comment this problem and If you like to know how this will continue just came back; i will update this page if something new happens.

So I ask Yamaha:

* Repair or exchange my dead 4416S and fix the problem !
* Improve your Service

* Increase product quality if it is really the case that a laser lasts for only 23 month of private, rare use

Till than..I watch my 4416 burning his last few CD-RW's..

Some computer magazines and web pages are currently running longterm tests with several recorders; I will inform them about my experience with my 4416, too.

To be continued !

Other users with similar problems

I have found more customers in the internet with bad experiences, see here for example:

"My Yamaha 4416S refuses to write CD-R discs now. CD-RWs seem to work fine, though. I use CDRWin 3.8, and I have an Adaptec AHA-294X SCSI card. Any time I try to record to a CD-R, the drive lights blink about 6 times. The CD is then ejected. After that I receive the following error: Error: 'WRITE' command failed on device 0:3:0 Unrecoverable hardware error 04h 00h 02h 04h 09h 00h It's about two weeks out of warranty now. The problem started about a week ago. I've tried two different types of CD-Rs since it started having problems: Verbatim DataLifePlus 74 min blue CD-Rs, and Memorex High Capacity 80min gold CD-Rs. I burned well over 30 of the same Verbatim discs prior to the recent errors. Any ideas? silveryn@knology.net ".

Or read this thread ! http://www.cdrom-guide.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/008637.html : Sounds very similar to my problem.

At http://www.cdrom-guide.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/009087.html you can find more drastical comments:

"You should try to e-mail yamaha from their website because maybe other people have had that problem before. I also have a yamaha which only lasted 1 year!! I'm never gonna buy yamaha <..> again!!!!"

http://www.cdrom-guide.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/007339.html:

"I think my crappy Yamaha 4416S has recently died on me cuz i must have coastered over 30 cds to date in under 1 month. "

http://www.cdrom-guide.com/ubb/Forum7/HTML/008283.html:

"I'm totally running out of ideas. I cleaned the cdrw, didn't seem to have built up any dust to mention. It's less than a yr old. I've tried changing settings in the computers BIOS, as shown at the Ahead site, but nada.."

"because I have a similar problem with my Yamaha 4416S (SCSI and it's nearly 2 years old) that I nearly "cannot" write anything with any software or any media, except at times with Nero and certain .bin files but thats the sum of it. <..>"

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