A lot of the stuff we watch my spouse and I are on DVD. And since we have not owned a TV set since the very early 00s, we watch our discs on an old laptop plugged on a larger external display, and on that laptop we plugged an old Samsung USB DVD Drive that has been working great for many years, and in almost complete silence.
For the last year or so, the drive started showing signs of weakness. It was making random noise when reading certain discs, like if it was constantly seeking something on the disc. Nothing too dramatic and nothing that would convince us to change the drive. Recently though, it also started to randomly stop playing the disc and crashed VLC, the app we use to watch DVDs. I tried with another app, it would still randomly crash. The discs themselves all seemed in perfect condition and, oddly, the drive was still working fine with other discs.
At least, it did so up until those last three days where it was almost guaranteed it would crash, no matter the disc we tried to play.
This DVD drive being around fifteen years old,if not older, I thought maybe it was time to retire it. So, I checked the price on Amazon and I was not happy with what I found.
They were all more expensive than our soon to be retired model and without any new ‘features’ explaining the price difference. That price even skyrocketed the moment I started considering Blu-ray disc support. We don’t own any BR but since I was going to buy a new drive, I wondered if that wouldn’t be wise to add support for that format. Just in case.
But, luckily for us, that won’t be necessary since I won’t be buying a new drive at all.
I fixed ours. And the fix was so simple, I feel stupid sharing it. But, hey, it worked.
I was really annoyed by the price of a new USB DVD drive and decided I would first try to fix ours. Would I break it, at least I would have tried to save us some money.
Before disasembling it to see if I could spot what was wrong with it, I got out the small electrical air blower I use to dust our computers so I could clean the drive.
That blower is small but really powerful. So, I kept it at a safe distance from the drive and its fragile components while briefly blowing air over it at its lower setting. More dust than I would have expected was coming out of it. Out of curiosity, I plugged the drive back and put one of the faulty disc in it and, would you believe it, it played just fine.
I tried with another disc. Same result.
That said, since I was cleaning the drive I took the opportunity to also clean its fragile lens/optical elements. Gently passing a cotton swab dipped into isopropyl alcohol. Very gently, as that thing seemed so fragile.
Since then, we have had no disturbing and random noise anymore and, more importantly, no crashes at all.Apparently, it was just some dust that needed to be removed.
I told you, a stupid fix that worked wonders.
Published: 2024/11/24