Optical Drive recognised only 50% of the time - Blu Ray problem?

[awediohead]

So I have a Pioneer BDR-209DBK 16x SATA Internal BD/DVD/CD Burner in my machine which I've made very little use of the last few years, but I'm about to embark on ripping a fairly large CD collection to lossless codecs for my NAS project.

The Pioneer is 100% of the time recognised by the BIOS but only 50% of the time in High Sierra 10.13.6 - when it works it works flawlessly. The other 50% of the time it disappears from the menu bar as 'No drives'. The system report doesn't see it and it's not in the SATA device tree either.

One or at worst three reboots will almost always guarantee it shows up again, and if I have to, I can live with that, but I hate not having things just working as they should. Especially as I've built hackintoshes for several family members who watch a lot of DVD's and in three or four years this has NEVER happened to them!! All the hacks I've built have been pretty formulaic - Haswell era CPU's, 87 or 97 motherboards and have been very reliable 'daily drivers' for a long time now.

The SMBIOS on this machine is 15,2 as it is on the other machines, some of which might be 14,2 but neither of these iMac models had optical drives- also I suspect if that was THE problem then the hack would never or just very rarely see the DVD drive.

I've tried all sorts of permutations in the BIOS, such as making the Pioneer the first drive in the boot order and messing about with CSM, (which doesn't seem to make any difference to the optical drive or the hackintosh booting reliably, or I've changed the drive to be 'hot-swappable' or shifted the physical SATA cables around. Often, when I muck about with things like this, the drive will show up and I'll feel quite smug until the next time I reboot and it's gone again.

Last ditch is to post here to see if anyone has any bright ideas - I'm stuck as I can't seem to do anything that either permanently makes the drive NOT show up or make it always show up, well other than physically disconnect it of course. That includes swapping out the SATA cable for a new one in case that was faulty.

The ONLY thing that makes sense to me is that maybe it's a problem with this being a Blu-Ray reader, when the other drives in the other machines are CD/DVD only - would that be enough to screw things up? If so why would it then work perfectly half the time?
cheers

 

[P1LGRIM]

When you have multiple different SATA controllers available the ODD should be connected to an Intel port.

 

[awediohead]

Thanks P1LGRIM - apparently this problem does occur on Windows machines (so I've read) and they suggest (amongst many other things involving the registry) connecting optical drives only to SATA_0 or the first yellow one, so I think I've eliminated that, but I will of course double check, having 'experimented' a few times late at night!

Double-checked: yes on the first yellow SATA, nothing connected to the brown ASMedia ports.

 

[awediohead]

At some point I'll test this drive thoroughly in Windows or Linux to double-check my suspicions, but it's just started not responding to eject on its physical button, in app instructions, the keyboard eject key and the menu bar - which has happened to me before on real Macs and it's always meant the drive is failing. In short, I suspect all this hassle has been because the hardware itself is faulty and it's just that I bought it simply because for me a tower PC isn't complete without an optical drive, but then only used it very occasionally and assumed any problems I encountered were hackintoshing based, when they probably weren't.