I had a case with my philips writer, it was doing all you said, and I
tried anything , cleaning, reloading the drivers ..

then I was about to change it and ... unfortunately the cooler detached
from the processor, which caused a complete disk crash (bad luck)

then I reinstalled windows and everything back on a new disk , and the
writer decided to work again as new ...

so , it was actually something somewhere in the software and it exacly
looked like the hardware was faulty

--
hydrogène et aviation
http://www.26266.ikoula.org/dom-decollage/