Ah ok that makes sense. I never had mine fail back in the day even though I was playing tons of CD-R’s, but that’s my n=1 experience.

More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.

FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.

Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.