When anything hangs in my computer, I worry. I get fairly repeatable scans with my 1693.
Maybe you are using discs with MIDs that are newer than your firmware, or maybe the drive is wearing out.
I burned 8x +R Verbatims and TY in mne. Also some Verb 4x +RW.
One thing that can happen to computers is the transfer mode of the IDE channel can get changed from DMA to PIO mode. You can see that in Device Manager. It should also be evident from a TRT scan.