I've got a Toshiba SD-R6252 DVD+RW drive in my laptop, and it seems to be working OK, except for not recognizing DVD+RWs. Firmware has been updated, I tried Maxell and Samsung media, and still it just appears as if there's no disc in the drive.
I got this drive as a replacement from HP instead of a Sony DVD+RW, which was about the same: able to do all but writing DVD+RWs, although it recognized them and instead produced a fatal write error. As it was also noisier and slower, I never really figured out whether it was the same cause&problem or not.
It gets weirder: yesterday I rebooted in Safe mode, and suddenly everything was fine - recognizing and writing the DVD+RWs (well, more or less; I ran into problems erasing one media.) But today it all went back to usual. I can already tell, by the first 5 seconds of the drive's noise, if it's gonna recognize the disc or not.
I thought it might have something to do with having DirectCD 5, but uninstalling it didn't change anything.
Any ideas, solutions or explanations, anyone??