Every drive with a lot of reviews on Newegg is going to have a fair amount of negative reviews because the quality of DVD burners across the board has becoming really hit-or-miss. This is what happens when drive manufacturers have to hit a $25 price point to get drives out the door. It's sort of like hard drives. Everyone has had a bad experience with one brand or the other so you may as well just buy the cheapest (with a decent warranty) and hope for the best.
I recently bought a new Lite On SATA burner from Newegg and ran into problems (CD burn errors, DVD reading errors, taking forever to read my Crysis disk). The errors were intermittent. I had put the older IDE burner it replaced in my wife's machine and it didn't experience the same problems (i.e. I would take a DVD that the new burner choked on, put it in my wife's machine, and using the exact same ripping program have no troubles at all). I recently had to reinstall windows on my machine and the Lite On got about halfway through the process and then decided it didn't want to read some of the files from the install CD. Install failed.
So I opened up a brand new IDE HP burner I had purchased last year as an X-mas present that I never gave. It got substantially further in the install process but eventually stopped reading files as well. So I took my older IDE burner out of my wife's machine, reinstalled it in mine, and now things are fine again. The install disk is in perfect condition (it's been in a drive fewer than a dozen times). Fortunately, these drives are so cheap that if you get something that doesn't work you won't get too badly burned (no pun intended).
I would really like to get a good SATA burner for my machine. I started this process (replacing my functional IDE burner) because my new 8800GT card is so long it blocks one of my IDE connectors and I have a Linux setup on a hard disk that is connected to the other IDE connector. If I can't find a decent SATA burner, I'll have to figure out how I can connect both the hard drive and burner to the same IDE cable (I'll probably need an adapter to fit a hard drive in a 5.25" bay.