bdr-ud04 - repair intermittent failure?

[micael456]

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.

[Coopervid]

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.

The enclosure of these Verbatim UD04 is very power hungry. So some USB3 ports might not provide enough. Use the rear port of a desktop PC or a powered USB hub. If all of this fails you can either exchange the enclosure or use the internal drive on a powered USB->SATA adapter. I believe you will also need a SATA-> miniSATA adapter.

[micael456]

Thanks coopervid. I should have said; I've already shucked the enclosure and I had it on a powered usb3 hub- though will connect directly to the back and see if that's any more stable. Appreciate the response.