Presently, I'm using an
LG GH24NSC0 Sata drive. Cheap and effective (~$20 USD and by most accounts works great). All of my old CD based systems seem to be happy with the writes from these drives. Previously I had a few HP, and Creative drives get weak and burn bad discs.
A very long time ago (mid 2000's?), I heard that LG's PATA/IDE "GSA-H10N" model DVD burner had the best laser as far as longevity goes, and the laser diode was so powerful, that you could remove it and turn it into a powerful burning laser that could light matches, pop balloons and burn pictures into wood. I bought two of them fully intending to build a death ray out of one. Because the one I installed never failed or burned a bad disc, I've never used the replacement (Brand new - never used). Yours for the cost of shipping if you want a drive that's tested and NOS (tho it's from BC, Canada so It may not be worth the investment).
In the late 90's and early 2000's I had terrible trouble with failing optical burning drives and cheap media for my backups. I took to verifying burns and even double checking written discs with my read-only drive to root out problems and verify data integrity - I couldn't really afford to upgrade my hard drive space or my optical drive. My go-to app was Infinadyne's CD-DVD diagnostic. It could read out detailed statistics on the drive's ability to read the recorded data, and also recover data by reading the sectors multiple times if a read failure happened.
I'm sure there's better free programs now.
I've had to replace some console's optical reader assemblies, as that was more often than not the problem.
edit: Laptop drive replacement? I have a stack - if you're interested, again - cost of shipment. I guarantee that nearly all of them have never been used more than a handful of times as I know the previous owners only ever loaded office and quickbooks (that's why I kept them). Easy to replace with a single screw. Never heard anyone want one before.