I'm pretty sure the hardware is OK. It works perfectly as a DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drive, and has never given any sort of problems EXCEPT when writing DVD-RAM disks. It's also only a few months old. I have come across a number of problem reports from people in the same sort of situation, but no resolution to it. It seems to stem from the point that windows support for DVD-RAM sucks arse, and only pioneer and panasonic drives seem to work.

I can't find any way of turning off write caching in the device manager. It was the first place I looked.

pca