There may be an off the shelf drive that works if you plug the ribbon cables directly from the laser, spindle motor, and corkscrew motor directly into the motherboard. I would imagine that you would need longer ribbon cables than the ones that come with such a drive. But again, I've never seen the internal disc feeder like the ones on PS3 drives in non-playstation drives. To my knowledge they are custom. Swapping the drive is easier on the later systems, but it isn't like you can grab any old bluray drive from a PC parts shop and have it work.So, you can't use any "off the shelf" drives as replacements on 25xx models? Or does the system somehow bypass the logic board on any "off the shelf" drive?
Regardless of whether you can or can't at least it makes it easier to replace a faulty drive, so Sony can be commended for that.
Regards,
SB