Same thing I've stated in SHIII forum

I'm a happy owner of SHIII (updated to 1.4)DVD and Lockon Flaming Cliffs CD. Both use starforce. I've been using these two for nearly a month now. In addition to this I also have Alcohol 120% plus daemon tools aswell. As I fly Janes Longbow 2 so I use demon tools to mount an image of the old cds of Longbow.

What I want to say is that the starforec thing hasn't touched me as yet. I've been reading these forums closely, and I've my 2 cents worth aswell, if someone likes to listen.

First of all the starforce is a software which runs only when the application is started. it goes and tries to check the unique signature on the optical medium that has been manufactured with it. In my case SHIII DVD and FC CD. In doing this signature search the starforce sometimes goes beyond the limits of the optical drive. Many optical drives have some limits like over burn and limited to not to read raw cd images, or not read some sectors of the disk. Starforce tries to read the signature without considering that the optical drive can support that or not. In this process the drive spins on its top speed to make the starforce read the desired sector on the medium. Sometimes the process goes smoothly sometimes the drive just fails, in other words locks, stops responding and such. When I play my disks the starforce takes for about 5 secs and then starts the game. Whereas a friend of mine had his drive running like it had a chainsaw built in it. Eventually his drive died. He was using a Samsung DVD/CDRW whereas I'm using a SONY DVD/CDRW. On my suggestion he bought a SONY drive and now plays FC without complaints.

Second whenever a CD /DVD drive locks up, usually few of their capabilities are temporarily disabled by windows. Usually the lockup process disables their DMA transfer capabilities, and they in turn switch to PIO transfer settings; which are some times totally incompatible with their mechanism, like they would stop writing properly or they would not open or not refresh when a new medium is inserted. These settings won't switch back with device manager or with the bios settings. You will have to manually edit the registry to get those DMAs back. For more reading go here

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6645

Also try to take the drive out, start the system, then normally switch it off and reinstall the drive. Don't throw away your drives just because they stopped working.

I'm not advocating starforce neither am I suggesting that one drive is better than others, all I'm saying is that there are (always) ways to work around any problem. I hope this helps someone