When Expensive Things Become Worthless: My Sony DVD Burner

Recently while digging through a pile of old electronics in my workshop I stumbled across this, my old Sony DVD/CD burner.

I began purchasing audio CDs in the early 90s, and bought completely into the format in 1993 when my car was broken into and all of my favorite cassettes were stolen. I never thought people would be able to burn CDs on their home computers; if such devices were ever produced, I reasoned, they would be much to expensive for the average person to afford. We got our first CD-ROM burner at work in 1995, a clunky external device with its own hard drive that burned CDs at 1x speed. Burning a CD with an hour’s worth of audio literally took an hour. It had a fairly high failure rate and blank CD-ROMs cost $10 each. I thought it was incredible. The hard drive that came with the computer I was using for my BBS held 212 MB, and a single CD could store 3x that amount. Simply amazing.

I purchased my first CD-ROM burner from Future Shop in 1996 while living in Spokane, Washington. It was a 2x model, meaning it burned CDs at twice the speed, and I paid $599 for it. The process was still fragile — simply opening an application or even opening a folder was sometimes enough to produce an unusable coaster, but over time things got faster, better, and cheaper. For many years it didn’t make financial sense to burn copies of audio CDs, but eventually it did. I used to drive around with a hundred CDs in my car at any given time; then I got a car stereo that would play mp3 files off of a burned CD. It was like having an entire radio station’s library with me in my car! (If only we knew!)

I got my first living room DVD player right around Y2K, and soon after that DVD drives began appearing in computers, followed by DVD burners. As it was with CD-ROMs, formats were always changing and speeds were constantly increasing. I paid $600 for my first DVD-ROM burner, which I left in my car overnight and was promptly stolen. I spent another $600 to replace it, and when that one died, I bought this one in 2006.

I believe this is the last DVD burner I consciously bought; after this, DVD drives were included by default in laptops and desktop computers. If I remember correctly, I purchased this particular model because it could burn both DVD-R and DVD+R discs, one of which worked with the Sony PlayStation and the other of which was compatible with Microsoft’s Xbox 360. It could burn both DVDs and CDs and even do RW (rewritable) discs. With a burn speed of 16x, it was a speed demon compared the the previous burners I had owned. I wanted to use the drive on multiple computers, which is why I picked an external USB model.

You may or may not be able to tell in the first picture that the unit’s front door is missing. It got jammed once, half-open and half-closed, and every time I turned the power on the plastic gears inside the unit would begin to strip. In an attempt to unbind the gears I dropped the drive onto my desk from about four-feet up. The front door broke and fell off, the drive began to work, and it worked ever since.

Except for ripping my own movies onto my home server, I haven’t used a DVD drive in years. For home media, DVDs were replaced by Blu-rays. On computers, optical media was replaced by smaller and faster storage mediums like USB sticks and SD cards. Today on Amazon you can get a 10-pack of 4GB USB sticks for $25, or a single 512GB stick for under $50.

You can also get an external USB Blu-ray burner for around $80, which I what I paid for mine last year. In case I ever need to burn a Blu-ray, DVD, or CD, I can do it with this drive. (Since purchasing it, I have burned exactly zero Blu-rays, DVDs, or CDs.) I still want the ability to be able to read and/or rip an old disc if I find one, so this will do all of that. It sits on a shelf disconnected, but ready for service if needed.

Which means, unfortunately, it’s time to put this Sony out to pasture. It’s hard not to see a stack of hundred dollar bills when I look at it, but the only thing it’s doing these days is collecting dust. Adios, old friend.