New WH14NS40 just bricked?

[shawnc22]

Hey guys, weird thing just happened with a new WH14NS40 i got last week. Flashed it successfully to a WH16NS60 1.00 through a ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.10 crossflash following the instructions in one of the other topics. Everything was going smoothly and have gone through about 20 of my discs already. Then just now when I was making a folder backup of Gladiator, the drive continuously made a clicking sound and refused to read the disk. After that, with every disk I insert (UHD or regular BR), it makes a couple of clicking sounds and comes back with nothing detected in the drive. I've since tried flashing it to a patched WH16NS60 v1.02 and the problem is still the same. Do I just have a bricked drive now? And if so, anything I can do to salvage it? Not sure what could've caused it since all the flashing went smoothly and I was ripping disks just fine for a good 3 days. I guess at worst I can get a replacement since it's still pretty new, but hoping to try to avoid that for now.

Thanks in advance!

[SamuriHL]

That's not bricked, that's defective. Others have mentioned the drive quality is especially poor these days so it just seems like a bad drive to me.

[shawnc22]

That's not bricked, that's defective. Others have mentioned the drive quality is especially poor these days so it just seems like a bad drive to me.

Ah figured as much. I have a replacement coming in the mail tomorrow and going to send this one back. Hopefully that one turns out differently. Anything different you would recommend doing this second time around? Should I just flash it directly to WH16NS60 1.02mk instead of doing the Asus crossflash to get to original WH16NS60 1.00?

[SamuriHL]

The firmware flashing didn't cause the issue, but, there's also no need to cross flash it with an ASUS firmware. Using the NS60 MK firmware should be sufficient I believe.

[shawnc22]

Odd thing I just noticed as I'm doing a bit more testing with this defective drive before sending it back. When I was on the NS60 firmwares, it was refusing to even read DVDs. But as I just tried the Asus firmware again and then back to the original NS40 1.04 firmware, I'm now at least able to read DVDs, but still no luck with BRs and UHDs. Probably doesn't mean much other than still a defective drive, but just thought it was a little interesting at least.

[dlbogdan]

Might not apply here but I have a bad experience from the distant past with a very expensive RICOH DVD burner (first wave of DVD writers) where I wrote 10 DVDs one after another and it went belly up.

I think there is real possibility of damage when the laser is driven for a long time with very short pauses even on current generation of burners.

[shawnc22]

Yeah I can definitely see that being part of the cause, especially on a lower quality drive. I was driving it pretty hard those first few days with little down time between rips and each taking 40-60 mins. I know it's been mentioned here in the past that the drives are pretty much the same hardware-wise, but I was wondering if being on the NS60 firmwares forces the NS40-labeled drives to work a little harder than intended to? Maybe it was labeled NS40 initially because it didn't pass some QA check to be labeled as an NS60?