Unfortunately the optical drives' quality goes less and less good. Around 2000, my work's computers contained high quality Plextor CR writers. Around 2009-2010 our new HP business class pcs had some less glorious and less resistant optical drives. The latest ones (2 years or so old) contain some very slim drives like the ones for the laptops and notebooks, very slow (nothing to do with those 52X speeds in the past). Trying to write a dvd disc, it took 50 min or 1 hour for something I would expect 15-20 min max in the past. And, of course, I'm not at all confident that this drive can last long. I complained about that to the IT responsible, he said that we can't find quality optical drives now. In fact, I think better drives are more expensive and aren't readily available in shops.
It seems that newer pcs don't include optical drives at all, as it is supposed that one can use USB sticks or the cloud for big fie storage.

Hmm, the discs I had, were too old, they had nothing on them, I just wanted to use them to transfer files from one xp system to another, I just used the USB storage disk that I thought seemed corrupt, but appears to so far keep working, as FAT system.

The disc drive seems to work for playing some old games, so that is what is important. I did look into the suggestion of buying a drive, on Amazon, but they are £18. It isn't like it is faulty, just a drive opening problem. Considered looking into a graphics card for the optiplex system, since it seems in good condition, there aren't any around cheap enough. It would be useful for blender 3d game engine. I have a few files.

I was never satisfied with rewritable discs. Most of the times, they worked well the first time, however in case I tried to erase them and write a new content a few years later I had problems, that's why I did use only write once discs. Cheap discs were almost non readable some years later, so my idea to use them for file backup copies was a big failure! Maxell dvds (not cheap) were safe 10 years later (nevertheless the drive itself was dead).