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[unmach]

I was on the xbox live forums today browsing, and a couple people made offhand comments about how installing modded fw on your 360 drive can make the drives controller give out, or lower the life expectancy of your drive.
Is there any truth to this?

[Xombe]

Shining that laser at ink time and again over the years may while off some lifespan (but harm the controller??), though that's just conjecture on my part mostly based on Xbox1 experiences.

Having said that, there is a more appropriate forum for this.

Moving...

[DuBob4432]

i have no real scientific proof, but i have been pretty heavy into computers for over a decade and this is basically just a computer dvd-rom.  i have hacked, upgraded and o/ced every machine i have ever had and had no ill effects of it whatsoever, as long as it was done in the correct manner.

i would go to say that these people really do not know what they are talking about and they might think that o/cing a cpu without adding any more V is going to somehow kill it faster....

again, this is my .02 and this has been my experience for more than the last decade dealing with computers.

hell, a friend of mine still has an old playstation 1 i modded for him and it works like a charm and is used by his kids probaby 3-6x/week (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) and those mod chips kind of do what the modded fw does, just a different way of delivering the code needed to get the job done.

in the end i am just give a guess based on readings of thousands of threads in hundreds of forums and personal experience, both of which say there probably is no issue with running a modded firmware, but i could be wrong.  from what i understand the modded firmware doesn't make the drives do anything they aren't suppose to do physically or go to an area of a disc they are not suppose to.

[Kirby64]

I doubt it lowers the life expectancy of the DVD drive controller, however it surely will lower the life of your DVD drive laser.  If you use good media, and don't use trasher $1.00/disc bargain bin DVD+R DL's, it shouldn't negatively effect the life of your DVD laser much at all.  Pressed DVD-ROM discs errors are much lesser compared to anything you can burn even with Verbatim media, so it has to compensate for the errors by increasing laser strength, and such.

A great example of the bad media thing are PS2's.  Sony allegedly used super-cheap lasers and such components in the PS2, so people had failing lasers(the fatal DRE error) even with original media.  Some people who modded their drives(soft-mod, modchip, or otherwise) would have their lasers fail on them after they started using cheap burnt media for PS2 backups.


Bottom Line: Use good media and you probably won't see an appreciable difference in the lifespan of your Xbox's DVD drive.

[DuBob4432]

QUOTE(Kirby64 @ Mar 2 2007, 02:35 PM)

I doubt it lowers the life expectancy of the DVD drive controller, however it surely will lower the life of your DVD drive laser.  If you use good media, and don't use trasher $1.00/disc bargain bin DVD+R DL's, it shouldn't negatively effect the life of your DVD laser much at all.  Pressed DVD-ROM discs errors are much lesser compared to anything you can burn even with Verbatim media, so it has to compensate for the errors by increasing laser strength, and such.

A great example of the bad media thing are PS2's.  Sony allegedly used super-cheap lasers and such components in the PS2, so people had failing lasers(the fatal DRE error) even with original media.  Some people who modded their drives(soft-mod, modchip, or otherwise) would have their lasers fail on them after they started using cheap burnt media for PS2 backups.
Bottom Line: Use good media and you probably won't see an appreciable difference in the lifespan of your Xbox's DVD drive.

kirby - i understand what you are saying, but when i have done quality tests (nero w/ a benq 1655) with verbatim dls and store bought pressed dvds (even the "higher" end signature edition of certain videos like gladiator with dts-es) and gladiator will score a 90 and burned media will be higher or just a bit lower, wouldn't that mean that it proably isn't going to harm your laser, again if using verbatim media and scoring higher or around the same in quality tests with pressed dvds?

[DuBob4432]

could somebody else weigh in on this?  it really got me thinking, so i did some tests and some of my burns of my originals were bad according to the nero quality cd-speed program, but after a little tweaking, i am getting better returns than pressed dvds, so would this mean that there would actually be less stress on the laser in the 360 if in fact this is a problem for longevity?

i did a back to back test today with a disc that i did that scored a 0 on the quality test even though i was using a pioneer 111d, fw v 1.29 and xbc 2.4 w/ imgburn, and verbatim dl media and then with the same game from the same source that i burned exactly the same way except i swapped out the firmware for the dangerous brothers 1.29 which is suppose to just deal with the region code.  well it scored a 95 on the quality and it did load noticeable faster on ms28.  but, even the backup that scored a 0 ran well, the one that scored a 95 runs perfect.  so does that mean there is less error recovery going on and then less stress on the laser even when compared to a pressed dvd?