Problems of HP 4020i and HP Support

HP-4020i stop reading CD-R
	When you put a silver CD in the drive, 4020 read it ok. But when you put in a good CD-R disk, doesn't matter its gold or green CDR, or its made by 4020i or not, the green light on 4020i will flash for a couple seconds then goes out. Meaning the drive doesn't recognize the disk as a readable CD. For now the only solution is send it back to HP for replace.
Write append error and Internal Controller Error
	When you write a CD larger than 500M, the writing will fail with a "Write Append Error" error message. In Easy CD software the message is reading like this "Writing Error 171-00-50-00". When you try to close the disk, you will get the another error message "Internal Controller Error". Apparently there is a spring in the drive near the laser head will get weaken, then the drive can't record large disk any more. There is a possible do it yourself fix floating around. Do it at your own risk.

Doesn't sound too bad? The problem is, those problems are so common, countless HP-4020is sold are bond to have either problem (or both) sooner or later, and apparently there are no solution, when HP send a replacement drive to you, you think that's it, you are all set. Then after a couple of months, the problem comes back! And most likely this time you are out of warranty and HP support don't even want to talk to you any more. (There are some users are "lucky" enough to replace the drive 2 or 3 times within the warranty period and finally HP agreed to give them choice of either upgrade their drive to HP 6020 or refund.

Support Issues
Even with a generally great company like HP, occasionally they still come out with a lame product like HP-4020i (We all know it actually made by Philips) when this happen, how the support department handle the issues becomes pretty important. If you just admit the problem and show your good intention to correct it. You can still give good impression to customers and the bad experience of fighting and struggling to get the product to work will soon fade away. But if you try to get cheap on customers, like give them hard time, kick them around or be cold to them, they will hate you, whenever it starts to mix with passion, they will remember it forever, they will bad mouth you, blame you on everything (even on problems have nothing to do with you) you will get bad reputation.

Refuse to support Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI card
	We can understand it costs to support customer, so they don't want to spend time on products they didn't make profit on. But HP at least need to be able to identify the source of problem and only send customer to other vendor if they really think its other device causing the problem. Instead HP use it as an excuse to give customers hard time. When you use an Adaptec card, they refuse to talk to you unless you go though all the trouble screwing up your own system by putting back their lousy Advansys card and driver. We are talking about a SCSI here, Adaptec 2940 may not be a perfect SCSI card, but too bad its almost the industrial standard now. Not supporting it is like a PC motherboard doesn't support Intel CPU. (In my case, my 4020i show the problem without even hook it up to a SCSI card, they still insist on putting in the Advansys card)
The hardware issues were never solved
	Lots of 4020i drives broke within warranty, HP usually send you a refurbished (that means it broke before) replacement drive when they can't find anything wrong at your end. The problem is, the only purpose of replacement drive is to help you last till your warranty expires. The 4020i design flaw probably has never been corrected. So the parts in your replacement drive will get weaken again and finally break on you sooner or later. There are users report they have had HP replace their drive for 5 times! (Check the post) But most users got inpatient at third replace and choused the refund it they had the option.
Standard procedures ?!
	Once your warranty expired, you are pretty much on your own. No matter it expired 1 year, 3 weeks or even 2 days. HP Support won't talk to you before you give them your credit card number. After you pay $25. They will try to diagnosis (include the insist on putting back the Advansys card crap) which you have been through before. Eventually, they will tell you their "Standard procedure" for out of warranty replacement will cost you $390 (the replacement drive will cost you $790 and you get $400 credit back for your old replacement drive) For that price you can buy a brand new HP-7110 CD-Writer (That is, if you are dumb enough to try them again) So basically the message HP is sending out is: For whatever price you paid for HP 4020i (remember 4020i was the first generation drive available for general public, a lot people paid $700-$1000 for it) , it will work for you for 1 year. After that, you can keep paying HP $400 every couple months to keep it going or you can get another drive. When you talk to their support technician, they will keep telling you "Sorry, but our standard procedure for this is...." or "Sorry, that's not our standard procedure..." Come on, give me a break, is that HP's standard procedure to make such a exceptional poor performance drive like HP 4020i? HP 4020i specs list the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) as 150,000 hours! That means we are not supposed to have to call HP support in 17 years! We should have sued them for false advertisement in the first place!