Burners are incredibly cheap, especially if you buy OEM models from Newegg.com and the like (around $20 or so). I get about a year on a typical OEM burner, then errors start to show up and I buy another. My first CD burner was a Plextor (SCSI, because it mattered back then), the last Plextor I bought (about three years ago) lasted a year and I decided at that point that I wasn't going to pay a premium for a drive that lasts a year. Of course, I burn a lot of discs

, so YMMV.
Buy good media, pay attention to the quality of your burns. If you start seeing a problem then figure it's time to spend another $25 on a burner.
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