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I bought my drive, an external USB 3.0 OWC Mercury Pro (drive mechanism is an LG, BH16NS40-SVC50, flashed to most recent LibreDrive for the drive right after buying) with external power supply, back in November. Flashed it to LibreDrive, had used it a lot since for various ripping of Blu-Ray, DVD and CD.

Then today, out of nowhere, it refuses to read *anything*, and also makes a nasty grinding noise if I insert media.

Turned on DEBUG,and essentially what I get is endless streams of:

001003:0020 DEBUG: Code 2281701379 at 6/ZSG47QXJME~':p:121267362
001003:0020 DEBUG: Code 268435459 at bI83g;#X\[44kJ^G:_z|K^{>@C5:213130789

I tried reverting to the previous version of MakeMKV (I'd only upgraded today, but I also only upgraded because the drive was being awkward), various combinations of plugging and unplugging, powering stuff off and on, and nothing makes a blind bit of difference. MakeMKV ID's the drive just fine, it's just that the drive refuses to recognize any media.

Any body got any clues what the problem might be? My own suspicions are just that the drive keeled over and died - I'd been going through a process of ripping all of my CDs to FLACs, then burning 100GB worth of FLAC to BD-XL discs, so it's been doing a *lot* of disc reading and has probably have to burn 10 or so 100GB BD-XLs (well, 8, two of the burns failed). I've tried it connected directly to the Mac's USB port, and also to a USB 3.0 hub that plugs into the Thunderbolt port on the back, and until sometime between stopping ripping on Friday and starting today, it's just...gone.

I just went through a similar issue. My WH16NS40 quit reading blurays. I tried several, with no luck. I had a DVD handy, and it read it fine. The last disc I remember successfully ripping, had several country errors that had to be worked around, which isn't normally a problem. The work around always seems to work. Probably not related...

I too have my drive connected with an external enclosure, via USB. I "never" turn off my PC. Several reboots and a software down grade didn't help, but when I manually turned the power off and on to the drive enclosure, blue rays started working after may latest PC restart.

For what its worth, log info displayed the following on error opening bluray...
DEBUG: Code 3 at wPw@X*c]4mg& [n>)i&~--ZG:29395310
SDF v08a: HL-DT-ST_BD-RE__WH16NS40_1.03_211711211653_KLGK1LJ1557

Ripping bluray as I write this...

Try powering off the drive with the power switch in the back of the Mercury Pro case, waiting server seconds and then powering it on again.

I've now tried every variation of power switch on and off, multiple USB 3 cables and multiple power supplies, and got nowhere. I contacted OWC, who sold me the drive, and I was up front with them and admitted I'd flashed the firmware, and would understand if this was considered to invalidate the warranty, but they seemed to be taking the support case seriously, and wanted a list of everything I'd tried to do.

Meantime, since time was passing, I bought a WH16NS60 online, and another OWC case to put it in. Figured that if OWC did replace my original drive, I'd have it as a spare, or my wife could use it.

Then OWC just ghosted me - I got a "how satisfied were you with our customer service?" e-mail, and that's it.

I know this is off-topic for the board, but does anybody know of a particularly reliable CD/DVD drive that I could put in the original enclosure? I do my CD ripping on a cheapo bus-powered $15 drive I bought on Amazon, and it looks like there are a number of "full size" SATA CD/DVD drives I could get for about $20-$25, so it wouldn't be a total waste of money - the OWC cases are generally very sturdy and a full-size drive would likely be faster at ripping CDs (the master plan is to rip my entire CD collection, which is large and accumulated over 30 years, into FLAC format, and burn the end result to M-DISC BD-XL discs, so I've got a secure backup I can keep elsewhere that won't take up much space)

Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide

There's a list of drives in the first post there that are known to support LibreDive. That would be the recommended drive list.

I have two OWC enclosures. One has a LG WH16NS60 and the other a ASUS BW-16D1HT. They've generally been reliable for me. With the exception of the Pioneer drives, they're all made by LG. I don't think one is more reliable than another. They either die early or seem to last a long time.

There are sellers here on this forum that will flash a drive and test it before they sell it to you if you want to go that route.

The Pioneer drives are pretty good, but they won't fit in the OWC enclosure. The Pioneer drives are too long (or the enclosure is too short).

The LG BU40N is well regarded, but as a slim drive, it won't fit in that enclosure either.

For ripping purposes, generally whatever drive from the list you can get for the least amount of money is right thing to do. If you want to actually write data onto optical discs, the Pioneer drives are the way to go.

Finally, MakeMKV supports ripping on two or more drives at the same time. You have to check "Ask for single drive mode" on the IO tab in preferences.