CDRLabs.com

am wondering if this is the cause of some of my CD problem as some of them have dust and the spot is there, the cd is readable but data loss happens.

I don't think it's bad at all. Mine has excellent quality on just about any media I've tried. We don't use it for cd burning because most of us have good faster CDRW drive's for that kind of work so why lessen the life of a $350 burner using it for cd type things. You just need to clean off the media gently before you burn with it and try to keep it put away so it doesn't get dust on it in the first place.

one thing i don't understand is it doesn't give any error message when it failed to burn properly...

As far as the program and drive knows every thing did fine, it doesn't know a dust spot blocked the beam I spose.

so i assume my problem regarding dust covering a small spot is not just limited to sony dru500a... but so far i haven't encountered this kind of problem with my liteon ltr48125W

probably not, I've never raelly looked that hard at one to see what is there but I always try to make sure the disk is clean before I stuff it in the machine. I've had some with scratches and they burned OK also. I would think if the dust or whatever is big enough it will block the laser light and cuase your problem, it is basicly light after all.

the stuffs i have scratches also burn fine on some cases... it's the spot that annoys me on my dru-500a... anyway, i guess wiping the cd is the way to go as of this moment.

i hope someone will come up a tool that can let the software tell whether the pit is properly llighted by the laser or not