DVD Writer scratching discs

One of my DVD writers, an NEC ND-2510A, has been in use for over two years now and must have burnt a lot of DVDs, and perfectly too. But in the past couple of weeks I've noticed the discs have started to develop small scratch marks on them after they have finished writing.

I always check the disc surface before I put a disc in to be written and they are always scratch free. But after the write process has finished and I take the disc out at least one scratch is then on the disc. The scratch is always on the outer edge and between .5 and 1 cm in length going from the edge of the disc towards the centre in a near straight line.

Any ideas what part of the drive could be causing this scratch?

I'm wondering if it could be getting scratched after the disc has finished writing, when it is being ejected, but I have no way of testing this.

The scratch doesn't seem to effect the reading of the disc though as I run them all through CDCheck after writing and they have no errors reported.

Maybe it's time to just replace that writer with one of the new NEC drives.

Might seem strange but do you use Nero to burn the discs, and have the verify option enabled? Some people seem to think this causes the problem.

Why don't you bin the writer and buy a new one?

I am probably going to do that as I don't want scratched discs.

And no, I haven't been using Nero, and never bother with its verify feature as it isn't to be trusted. In the past it has verified discs for me, and then when I run them through CDCheck I've found errors!

I did read about the Nero scratch issue and users said the scratches appeared in a circular pattern around the centre of the disc. On my discs it is a single scratch, or scratches, on the outer edge that seem to be in line with the movement of the disc tray.

I think I will replace it with either an NEC AD-5170A or the Pioneer DVR0112 18x writer .

If the scratch is just a line in the direction of the tray, I would assume there is something touching it when it is ejecting.

Do make sure you have a look underneath teh tray to see if there is anything that isn;t in the right place.

That was the first thing I did but there is nothing unusual or out of place. And even stranger is that the last few discs I burnt using the drive don't have any scratches on them! :unsure: very odd.

I did work out the drive must have burnt a 2000+ DVDs so far so it is doing well.