Which, really, was a good thing for me personally -- it freed up a lot of time and let me discover other things that I got more value out of.

>Spore installations damaged burners

Say what? The only thing that comes to mind is burner build to a lowest price point, for example using very flimsy Laser sledge build with assumption drive will only be used for linear writes with minimum amount of seeks

https://goughlui.com/2025/04/20/project-the-24x-dvd-burning-...

Original PlayStation had similar problems with high seek loads https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps1/CD_drive#:~:text=stuttering%20... and was originally build to last 70K seeks with those crappy plastic sleds https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-crash-ba...

'Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”'