I've already posted about the weirdness with DVD drives I've encountered under Debian Wheezy Linux.

I have been using ASUS DVD drives (ASUSTek manufacture). They have always read just fine and written CDs (most of the computers I deal with don't write DVDs).

I discovered, though, that they don't write DVDs very well at all, at least the current batch doesn't. In particular, they couldn't copy disk 8 of the 32 bit Debian Wheezy distribution set. I tried three programs, CDBurnerXP, Nero and Cyberlink Power 2Go, on both Windows XP and Windows 7. No good copies (Nero was the worst). I tried K3b under Debian Wheezy with the same result. The drives in both machines were fresh out of the box.

So, I raplaced the ASUS drives in both machines with rather more expensive IOMagic drives (LG manufacture). These write perfectly every time (tested with CDBurnerXP and Power 2Go), but Power 2Go, under Windows 7, is now encountering door opening problems pretty much identical to the Wheezy problems. It did not have those problems with the ASUS drives.

Strange

The ASUS drives are supposed to be 24x (like everyone else's), but all the programs under all operating systems automatically read and wrote the ASUS drives no faster than 8x.

With the IOMagic drives all programs read and write at 16x with perfect results. My Phillips DVDs are rated 16x.