NEC ND-2510a dvdr drive dead?

Looks like my drive is dead after making 50+ backups. I just finished a backup yesterday and I went to start another one and DVD Decryptor told me that it could not find my drive. I reset and everything seemed to return to normal. Today, after backing up 4 DVDs something strange happened with the 5th. DVD Shrink told me that the backup was finished immediately after it had completed the encoding process. The drive did not eject like it would a successful backup and of course the dvd was blank. I benchmarked the drive in Sandra using an original dvd movie and it came in below 1x (it should be 8x). The playback seems to be fine, it just will no longer burn. I was wondering if this could be an overheating problem or is the drive just dead. Does anybody have any tips before I begin the RMA process?