PS3 blueray drive swap?

[Official Ninja]

Can the BD drive in the 1st gen PS3 be swapped out with another?
Our PS3 saw a lot of use when we 1st got it around the PS3 launch.
Then it just sat there really for a very very long time not being used because of the 360.
Anyway, it no longer reads discs. I opened the system, took the cover off the BD drive and cleaned the lens very gently. It worked a little better at 1st, but then went back to not reading discs. I did the database rebuilding thing and still no good.

I see these drives for sale on ebay and that makes me guess they can be changed. I just want to make sure that its not like the 360 where the drive is married to the system.

 

[SetaSouji??]

Close, there's three variations on the drives (two types for the FAT and one for the slim). You need to open yours up to see if the daughter board is outside the drive, or inside it.. and order said variation. The daughter board from your old drive will NEED to go into the new one, so be careful with it and don't expose it to mass light, they forget to cover the eeprom sometimes :|

An easier (cheaper) alternative is to just buy the laser deck for it, because it fits all three models and it's cheaper. It sounds like your drive still intakes disks fairly well, so it does not need replaced.

 

[Futasan]

Unfortunately, the daughter board (attached to the bd drive) and the motherboard are paired by a common key.
You can change the lens, or the full optical drive, as long as you keep the daughterboard that correponds to your motherboard.

 

[LWK]

I'm bumping this to get rid of Xian Xi ruined the main forum table with his 7,000,000 figure nick, haha.

 

[Official Ninja]

Thanks for the replies.

I went ahead and purchased a new slim model. Its sweet.

However, I do want to try to fix this one at some point.

Is it safe to say that if I see a drive on ebay that looks like mine, I can get it and swap the daughter board? Are they easy to swap? some ribbon cables and screws?

The drive I have has the daughter card under the drive at the front.

*edit: more exactly is this what I need? looks easy to replace.

http://cgi.ebay.com/OEM-PS3-LASER-L...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eaee79731

 

[Official Ninja]

Took me a while to get to it, but I got a replacement laser and deck from ebay, $58 shipped.
This was a launch PS3 so it had the single lens assembly. The swap went well and the console works great again.

 

[sammybean]

Took me a while to get to it, but I got a replacement laser and deck from ebay, $58 shipped.
This was a launch PS3 so it had the single lens assembly. The swap went well and the console works great again.

$58?! I paid $38 for a full drive..