The 240p Test Suite on Dreamcast does a single load on boot to minimize any laser usage, and does no further reading.
There are units out there that heavily used backups, and the units themselves are 20+ years old now.
Unfortunately we don't have any reliable data, just a few posts that are years old claming that.
I am sorry to hear about your trouble.
I figure that I might as well toss my hat into this ring as I have a little experience in the matter.
the CDR and DVDR killing consoles only applies to a single console series, the PS2. the PS2 has a security chip in it that was an attempt by Sony to control piracy.
it works by detecting that the disc is hard to read and then sends overload current to the laser, burning it out. its the reason that the fat PS2 has a horrible failure rate as the chip could not determine the difference between a scratched disk and a reproduction. causing the chip to kill a PS2 that was using the correct game disc.
A mod used to exist to bypass the chip and if you are going to use reproduction disks I suggest tracking one of them down. otherwise you are risking the drive burning out.
on using CDR with Retro hardware there is a general rule of thumb. the older the console, the less sensitive the drive is to drive faults. that and modern drives have a habit of automatically correcting errors that where there in the original disc. so when the game tells the cd drive to go to the exact sector of the disk to read the data there and it misreads the data becouse its now earlier on the disk causing the game to fault out.
When burning CDR for older consoles what you need to do is buy good CDR and Burn at the lowest possible speed available. The slow burn rate makes the game run better in the long run.
how the drive works is that the drive is expecting sharp transitions from 1 to 0 in the data of the disk. CDR works by using a laser to burn a wavy pattern into the substrate of the disc. newer drives correctly read the CDR by being far more sensitive in the reading department so it reads them correctly.
Older drives where built in an era that the CD industry where trying to kill off CDR as they saw it as stealing their revenue. many manufactures made their drives so that they would make it hard to use CDR. the drives in the consoles where usually just off the shelf components with a special output.
combine age with the fact that drives usually add more power to the laser lens to read dirty disks and you have a recipe that is a plausible reason for the CDR kill drives argument. neglecting the fact that they forgot that the 20/30 year old drive itself needs preventive maintenance from time to time. most people don't know that the components in the consoles where usually the cheapest that where available and didn't know that several components need to be replaced on a 10/15 year interval unless they fail and burn out a chip that is unreplaceable. (Free tip is to avoid the Jag-CD as cheap custom chips are what is failing in them)
The CD/CDR war is fascinating in its own way as it set many standards in odd ways. if you want to read some weird stuff and are ready to get lost in the dumbest, pettiest rabbit hole you have ever seen look some of it up. the reason that MP3s didn't have the right volume when burned to a cd made me chuckle as its kind of stupid.
I use TY disks for anything from the 90s back. they say that they are out of manufacture but that is not exactly true. their discs are just sold under a different label. same tech, different name.
