I'm going to side with CRT. There's been enough stories over time about the lower end quality CDRs where they can cause additional wear and tear to the laser or at least the pot settings on the inside or more grinding to the motor as well, but I'd argue it's minor yet cumulative. Going years back I saw enough people who played DC day and night who were crooks just running those terrible 90s/00s burns, the ones with the data splattered all over the place out of order because of hatchet job removal of audio/FMVs to fit to a disc. People ended up having to open their system and tweak things, or if they were impatient or didn't care as it was cheap, tossed it and replaced.
If it wasn't an issue with the DC, why was there a project done after so many years (this decade) by two groups no less who took all the old game disc originals and did new dumps. The idea of these dumps were to remove NO info but use modern tools to recompress the video FMV primary first second the audio on the DISC so it would sit on a standard 700MB CD. Also in doing that they would retain the original order of data, or if they found by design the game perhaps would run around a bit to grab data, they'd re-org the data in a more linear fashion which in turn not only put less wear on the drive, some games would load up faster than a retail disc.
Seems like a lot of effort for smoke and mirrors and hallucination that some people would go to those amounts of work to re-burn an entire library of games and individually tweak every single one of them to their best or superior to retail read/write values.
RCBH: I have one from October 2000 so it's over 16 years old and it runs like new still with no problems. Only issue was a dead internal battery so I tore it open, removed the board, desoldered the solid battery/metallic holder and put in a bracket to hold a replaceable battery for future easy restoration.
I only got it days before Christmas, so I don't know a lot of the history on it. The memory cards all had data going from 2000 into 04 or 05 so it got a lot of use for around 5-6 years but it could have been stored since in the box I found it in.
