Never turns off

I could never get the drive to stop unless I completely turned the power off. I had some of the same problems others had with the disc spinning too fast and making lots of noises.

quality is bad

I have dvdrom on my laptop. so I bought this to burn dvd.
1. It has extremely high fail rate(more than 90% fail, I wanted to burn 3 dvd and 32 blank discs were destroyed). The problems are all the same. the recorder freeze. it can stop anywhere, range from 1% to 100% of processing. even though I just repeat the same project, it can stop somewhere else. and the same problem happen to the one I exchanged from officemax too.
2. I tried all the methods to find out the reason(you named it, change media, upgrade everything, Even restore my system). Finally I used other brand external dvds recorder without any problems. It turn out the problem is this dvd recorder itself.
3. Ask tech help from this company is pain. Their tech support phone line is dead. only live chat is active. they tell you to upgrade this and that and try to burn a dvd. of course it did not help. since the problem is the product itself. when I used my friend's dvd recorder, I did not need to do anything.
4. I should read  more

I'm sorry I ever bought this

Although this unit mostly works, it spins at very erratic speeds and likes to occasionally overspin and lose its grip on a spinning DVD, at which point the DVD goes banging around loose inside and you have to power the unit off to stop it. Then when you power it back on for a second to eject the DVD, there's a burning smell that smells pretty toxic. I'm going to throw this away and buy something else, definitely by another manufacturer.