Man this sucks I have a DRU510 that works fine, but my friend has a DRU500 that burns disks with little errors sometimes that shows up on my DVD player. Fortunately his drive failed the test app that sony has (write error), otherwise aparntly he would have as much chance as a fart in the wind. I don't know if he RMA'd it yet, he's pretty busy.
Those Plextor 8x drives are looking good, 8 minutes for a dvd....