I received mine from Zipzoomfly (GoogleGear), also. I have not had the problems you have and would agree that it may be bad. Mine is actually fairly quiet and smooth in operation.
I cannot speak from personal experience, however, from reading other post elsewhere they are suppose to have a great RMA department. I order from them or Newegg based on both of their reputations.
Just as a quick follow-up. I have burned, read, and done everything with this drive without any problems since the firmware "upgrade". I also upgraded to the BX06 firmware and have not had any problems. This is a very good drive.
Actually you can upgrade like you heard allready the DDW-061 to DDW-081 but there's a chance failure it will not upgrade succesfully. If your in the group where the upgrade from 061 to 081 went perfectly you can also attempt to make the DDW-081 a DDW-082 with the B37(5/7) firmware to turn it into Dual format , but again theres about a 50-60%~ chance on that to fail aswell.
But anyway if you have a DDW-061 upgraded to a DDW-081 you can use the BX32 firmware, its better the BX03 (offcourse) or if you failed the upgrade you can use the BX31 firmware which you can download at http://www.nu-europe.com
DDW-061 and DDW-081 are hardware layout the same, just DDW-081 have made the factory sorting and where they failed they became DDW-061.
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