How long do CD-R drives last?
The MTBF on these drives is typically 25,000 to 50,000 hours, and they come with a 1 year warranty. Compare that to hard drives rated at between 500,000 and 1,000,000 hours with a 3 or 5 year warranty and that should give you some idea. Most of the drives available weren’t meant for mass production; notable exceptions are the Philips CDD 522, Kodak PCD 600, and Sony CDW-900E. Incidentally, MTBF is not an estimate of how long the drive will last. Rather, it’s an estimate of the failure rate of the drives during the expected lifetime of the device… after a year or two, the anticipated failure rate increases. If you have new drives with an MTBF of 25,000 hours, and you run 1000 units for 100 hours, you can expect to see four of them fail. It does NOT mean you can expect them to run for 2.8 years and then all fail at once.
