DR8 A DVD/CD burner survey

Question

howdy
i have one of these drives and after reading through this forum i was a little shocked to see so many issues with these drives. personally i've had 1 problem with mine where it has difficulty recongising blank CDR's. after flashing to the lastest bios its been fine. in all honesty i don't use my drive that often to burn CD's or DVDs though i do play alot of music and films though it. despite the fact that forums are used to document and troubleshoot problems so gaining an idea of overall drive quality is going to be a little skewed. however i was wondering if those reading with these drives could post and answer these questions;
1-have you had/having a problem with a DR8-A unit
2-if so, has it been fixed through troubleshooting or flash
cheers.

Answer 1

I currently have one being RMA'd.
It simply stopped recognising DVD's (pressed, writable, rewritable, all types) altogether.
It could still read cd's and cd-r's.
I've never had any luck with the HD-Burn feature of the writer either despite using high quality cd's when testing.
Having said that, the DVD writing part when it actually worked was very good. It could flawlessly write to 4x Shintaro DVD's and Infosmart DVD's (both cheap DVD -R media) that my replacement burner (a liteon 812S SOHW) cannot burn correctly.
EDIT: drive was hooked up to an ASUS A7N8x Deluxe Rev2.0 motherboard, but not directly to the built in IDE ports, it was running off of a PCI IDE controller (CMD 09648 based). The drive was tested on the built-in ports and several other different boards before being returned to place of purchase for RMA.
EDIT2: checked Liteon's website and they have new firmware available that pretty much solved my media problems (for Shintaro at least, infosmart still does not work). MSI can stick their burner wherever... I should have known better than to buy MSI again after the MSI nForce1 (MSI K7N420 Pro) fiasco I had the misfortune to be caught up in.
EDIT3: for those of you curious about the media I mentioned:
Shintaro - http://shintaro.com.au
Code: [Select]
       Drive Type = DVD DUAL
         Disc Type = DVD-R (Single Layer)
          Disc MID = 50 52 49 4E 43 4F (PRINCO)
          Disc TID = 00 00 00 00 00 00 (......)
  Nominal Capacity = 4.38GB
Manufacturer Maybe = Princo Corporation
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 4.0X (Write)
InfoSmart - http://www.infosmartmedia.com.au
Code: [Select]
       Drive Type = DVD DUAL
         Disc Type = DVD-R (Single Layer)
          Disc MID = 49 4E 46 4F 53 4D (INFOSM)
          Disc TID = 41 52 54 30 31 00 (ART01.)
  Nominal Capacity = 4.27GB
Manufacturer Maybe = Unknown
SMART-BURN Speed Limit = 4.0X (Write)(media descriptions taken from Liteon SmartBurn.EXE utility int their downloads section)