Unless he bought his xbox recently it will either be a Toshiba/Hitachi or BenQ drive in the xbox. Besides which the current Lite-on drives in the xbox have not been hacked.
I would therefore say the drive is a Toshiba, probably an MS25 variant going by "one of the first drives fitted in X360". In any event lots of poeple have had varying success using different media. I personally use Verbatim media for everything and have yet to find something that has found it hard to read the media. Also remember different discs use different dyes, that could simply be the issue in which case check the codes on the media and experiment.