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I have a feeling this ASUS BC-12B1ST I have has reached the end of its 4-year life.

Normally, this drive has been very reliable for me in ripping discs, but then it started to fail in reading some UHD discs, so I bought another UHD-friendly drive to rip those movies, and used this ASUS as a backup for regular BD and DVD movies. As I recently bought a large amount of Blu-ray titles at once, I plugged in the drive again to have the ability to save two movies at once to my computer, but just today the ASUS has been starting to "freeze up" when in the middle of saving a movie file, and MakeMKV starts throwing device errors and no longer recognizes the drive. Pressing stop in MakeMKV and eject on the drive does nothing, and I have to forcibly turn off the external enclosure it's housed in for the drive to turn off. MakeMKV and my computer now don't recognize the drive half the time when I try to use it.

Has this drive reached the end of its life, or is there a way to fix it?

Discard it. These LG type drives don't last very long. One of mine died after 2 years.

Coopervid wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 08, 2023 8:32 am

Discard it. These LG type drives don't last very long. One of mine died after 2 years.

That's what I figured I should do. It's seen many, many discs throughout its 4-year lifespan. I'll go ahead and find a replacement desktop drive. My LG (go figure) BP60NB portable drive is alright, but I would definitely like a desktop drive that has faster speeds, and would be another option if a disc fails in the portable drive. Maybe I'll buy one of Billy's drives as my next one.

I had exactly the same behavior on an Asus BW-161HT internal drive when the SATA cable was just a little loose on the drive side. As far as I could tell the vibrations when the drive got going were enough to start causing intermittent contact on one of the pins. With the internal drive, this would result in eventual bluescreens if I let it keep going or eject decided not to work fast enough. Then it started acting up and not showing as a valid drive on some reboots too and I re-seated the cable on both ends and everything was fine. Does this happen to be going on right as your drive reaches the highest ripping speeds? I'd strongly suspect this one either your enclosure's internal cables if it uses them (don't think there's a standard backplane for optical so probably does) or the USB(?) or whatever interface closest to the drive. A drive in an external enclosure won't give you SATA errors in event viewer that can help spot this as easily.

Of course it could actually be dying, too, but this seems like a strange failure method. Usually when my BD-R drives have failed it's the bluray laser suddenly dying... complicated working / not working states seem like connection.

With the old machine it was in the Asus drive would very rarely start refusing to read disks when it was on a sata controller port with hot plug enabled and require that the computer be fully powered down including the PSU and not just rebooted (and no I don't use any kind of standby or fast boot) because stray capacitance from somewhere was enough to keep it stuck in a bad state across a reboot. Weirdly on the secondary controller it was on hot plug was needed to make it work right. Your drive is always hot-plug in a way, being in an external enclosure, and might need the power from the enclosure to the wall pulled to get the drive acting normally, but I still think it's more likely to be the first thing.

In any case having an extra drive that libredrive works on can't hurt, I've been meaning to buy one as a backup.