I'll tell you a simple thing regarding optical drives. Everyone has faced problems with every brand. No point of being brand conscious.
In the old days, Samsung drives never used to open. I replaced those with Lite-On and Lite-On was too noisy. Then father bought a HP media center PC and its DVD writer went poof within a year. I replaced my Lite-On DVD Writer with a Sony and Sony also went poof within a year. It also had trouble while reading few DVDs which was resolved by a firmware upgrade. Now the Superdrive of Mac mini is also giving me problems.