I suspect I know the answer to this question...

Question

...which is: You'll need a new one soon, my friend. BUT, I'm in an optimistic mood so maybe someone can help me with a different, less drastic/expensive, answer. My MBP's Optical Drive, a MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-85J, symptoms are as follows. It has always been a noisy unit but it has become particularly loud when burning and reading (oddly, louder with CDs than DVDs, although data vs av media doesn't seem matter).
But, far worse, is that when I copy files and folders onto discs for burning (using Apple's on-board Burn interface) it has started to time-out during the copy, particularly when handling larger folders upwards of 200-300mb, and displays the "spinning pinwheel of destruction". Only Relaunching the finder can exit this state but usually the Burn folder will show that the target folder did, in fact, copy completely.
I've tried copying from a variety of source drives and it always happens so I'm fairly confident that the fault lies with the Optical Drive itself or the interface and isn't a hard drive problem. Nevertheless, I've run Disk Utilities on everything, fixing both Permissions and Repairing Disks, as well as running Onyx. I'm having no other problems, just the burning hang. I have a bit less hard disk space free than the 10% of my 140 gig drive I usually keep but still have over 8 gigs free and the problems started just last week, after I'd burned a number of discs for as archives.
If the consensus IS that this is a dying Optical Drive (it is several years old and I use it often, but have used other Mac-installed drives, in my towers, far more and expected this one to last as long as those) -- is it the type of thing a user is able to access/replace oneself? I have always expanded and updated the hardware in my Mac towers but have not yet opened up my MBP.
I'm also quite curious to know why burning data to a CD would be so much noisier, suddenly, than to a DVD, if there is any logical explanation for it.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Have you tried running the extended version of the Apple Hardware test? I believe that it tests the optical drive.
You could always consider using an external optical drive, preferably firewire.
If you decide you want to replace your internal drive, here is a link that will give you instructions:
http://www.ifixit.com/
Whichever route you decide to go, you might want to research optical drives first. I have read many complaints about Apple's notebook optical drives, and it may be you can find a better one to use as a replacement.
If you do open up your Mac to replace the optical drive, you might also want to replace your hard drive with a larger and faster one. It sounds like you could use more hard drive space. You can get up to 500 GB capacity and some are available in 7200 RPM.
Good luck!