"Protect" UHD-capable drives by using a different one for Blus/DVDs?

[Idaho121]

Hi all,

I dusted off an old LG I had to start ripping some of my UHDs and it threw a few hash errors on some disks, so I went looking for another UHD-capable drive in case mine is failing. I found one (thank you, forums!), but it seems they are getting harder to find and might disappear!

If I'm going to rip a few hundred regular Blu-rays/DVDs, is it worth getting a cheap, non-UHD capable drive to prevent the wear/tear on the UHD drives? If so, is there a recommended one for that?

Thanks!

[Coopervid]

Hi all,

I dusted off an old LG I had to start ripping some of my UHDs and it threw a few hash errors on some disks, so I went looking for another UHD-capable drive in case mine is failing. I found one (thank you, forums!), but it seems they are getting harder to find and might disappear!

If I'm going to rip a few hundred regular Blu-rays/DVDs, is it worth getting a cheap, non-UHD capable drive to prevent the wear/tear on the UHD drives? If so, is there a recommended one for that?

Thanks!

You might find some non-UHD capable drives but pretty much production has been stopped for all optical drives.

[kaysee]

If you have a DVD-only drive, it makes sense to use it for DVDs and CDs. I have a "PBDS" drive in a Dell desktop case from 2007 that works fine for DVDs, so I use that instead of a blu-ray drive.

If you have an old blu-ray drive that does not support LibreDrive, it probably makes sense to use that for most blu-rays. One possible problem is having a revocation event due to inserting a newer blu-ray, which cannot be bypassed via LibreDrive. So it would be safest to read blu-rays that are not very new on an older drive.