Is my Asus DRW-2014L1T defective?

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers Asus / Pioneer Writer
#1

There are several weird symptoms:

  • The drive sometimes disappears from the Device Manager. I need to restart the machine to get it back.
  • Loading Video DVD’s sometimes takes forever (both in XP and in Vista), requiring me to kill DVDFab, Disk Management console or whatever application I’m running that tries to access the drive.

Are these symptoms common to this model (or to SATA writers in general)?

I also have a new Pioneer DVR-116DBK (IDE writer) that works fine on the same machine, well, except for excessive vibrations, but I can live with that.

#2

I’m still trying to figure this one out. The drive does work fine when connected to another PC (a newer one). Is there any chance a SATA-to-USB adapter or SATA-to-IDE card will work better than the SATA controllers on my ABIT AV8 3rd Eye motherboard?

Oren