No one can say when it will die, but as long as the burn quality remains decent, keep on using it. I have the same drive and have also put close to the number of burns that you have through mine, still burns great as it always has. Same thing for my NEC 1300, it’s gone through alot of burns and it is still burning great.
If you don’t have any valid reason to get a new burner, keep on using it. I can tell you that the NEC 2500 burns just as any of the newer burners, just slower. If you want a faster burning drive or want PI/PO testing, NEC and Benq both make great burners. I bought a Benq 1640 despite having several burners I’m happy with, I was mostly interested in some of the new features that QSuite provides, and also was hoping to get better burns out of some of the cheap, generic media that I have. It’s been a good burner with the cheap media I wanted to test so far, although QSuite hasn’t seemed to really benefit me much as of yet, and I don’t care about faster burn speeds, 8x is fast enough for me.
So just keep on using your NEC if it suits your needs. PI/PO testing is nice but should not be a big loss if all you are burning is TY on an NEC, the combination will work very well. Just do a Transfer Rate test on your discs every now and then to make sure that the burn quality is decent and not failing on the drive.
