Had my drive's firmware updated to 1.0c also. It used to have a problem that it sometimes would not open. That seems to have been fixed. Apart from that, I don't notice anything else.

Recenty did not read a CD I wrote in 1998. The CD did not have a single scratch at the bottom. It failed with CRC validation errors. Guess I can estimate the life of my CDs now .

I don't use it for much DVD work. Just to read DVDs that I get from friends. I've moved to magnetic storage. Much faster, no disk changing and an external drive ensures backup of data in case my internal drive fails.