bdr-ud04 - repair intermittent failure?
Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2026 10:42 am
Morning, bit of a long shot I know, but since I missed out on asmcom's latest store open window I have a small pile of 4k discs stacking up, so I wondered if maybe repairing my drive was a possibility.
Some backstory; I have a Pioneer UDR-04 which was in one of the verbatim enclosures. It was manufactured in May 2024, so not the oldest drive. It worked well for a while, then late November time it started to randomly skip on disks; it would make the clicking sound that it makes when doing the initial seek, and just never get to the nice spinning sound / find the disk. Initially it worked for CD/DVDs, but then even that stopped.
At first I thought that was just the end of the drive, but then occasionally it would work again with blurays, and plugging it into a different system worked. So I then started to suspect USB/driver issues. This worked fine for a short while, until it stopped working on the second PC, but would work on the laptop.
Anyway, long tale short, I suspect the drive components are actually fine, but I'm not sure where the fault could lie, or if there's a realistic (and economic) prospect in fixing it. Given that when it works it works flawlessly, I suspect power delivery or usb related. I was wondering if some of you fine folks might have come across this before, and have some pointers or documentation you could point me at?
Thanks in advance.
Some backstory; I have a Pioneer UDR-04 which was in one of the verbatim enclosures. It was manufactured in May 2024, so not the oldest drive. It worked well for a while, then late November time it started to randomly skip on disks; it would make the clicking sound that it makes when doing the initial seek, and just never get to the nice spinning sound / find the disk. Initially it worked for CD/DVDs, but then even that stopped.
At first I thought that was just the end of the drive, but then occasionally it would work again with blurays, and plugging it into a different system worked. So I then started to suspect USB/driver issues. This worked fine for a short while, until it stopped working on the second PC, but would work on the laptop.
Anyway, long tale short, I suspect the drive components are actually fine, but I'm not sure where the fault could lie, or if there's a realistic (and economic) prospect in fixing it. Given that when it works it works flawlessly, I suspect power delivery or usb related. I was wondering if some of you fine folks might have come across this before, and have some pointers or documentation you could point me at?
Thanks in advance.