I had previously bought Asus BC-12D2HT in June 2018 which I upgraded to LibreDrive-enabled firmware when a suitable firmware was available for that drive (don't remember the exact date). The drive and MakeMKV worked great for a long while until in the middle of intense ripping some discs started to work poorly: lots of worrying sounds and Windows and MakeMKV being unable to read the disc. Sometimes these would be solved by removing and putting the disc in again but after a while all discs stopped working completely. Even the discs that had worked previously. The situation was same for both Blu-rays and UHD discs. However CDs and DVDs worked just fine. I thought there was some problem with the laser calibration or something and ended up throwing that drive away in October 2020.
I immediately bought a new UHD drive Asus BW-16D1HT which I upgraded to LibreDrive-enabled 3.10 firmware. Once again the drive worked great with MakeMKV but already today the drive started to fail in a similar way to to the old drive. Some discs did not work until I removed and put them back in and then all discs failed. I was suspicious about two drives failing the same way especially with this drive being so new so I ended up flashing back the original 3.02 firmware, reading a single Blu-ray with MakeMKV and re-flashing LibreDrive-enabled 3.10. All discs started to work once again.
Is this something that is to be expected? Has this been documented somewhere? I noticed a few threads with similar problems but no suggestions about flashing back the original firmware.