Philips & BenQ VAD6038 DVD Replacement Drive for Xbox 360

My DVD drive was not recognizing that there was a disk in it until I had opened and closed it numerous times. I checked on X Box live and found my warrenty had expired, however I could send in my X Box and Microsoft would replace the drive for $100. I looked up "X Box 360 DVD Drive" on Amazon and was pleasantly surprised to find drives for as cheap as $29. All the comments suggested that changing the drive was easy after viewing clips on YouTube, I am partial to Toshiba so I ordered one. Once my drive came, I found appropriate clips on YouTube and realized that unless you are replacing the original with the same brand of drive you can't just swap cards (once you watch the clips you'll see what I mean). Several YouTube videos suggested that you can use a different brand of drive if you flash the new drove with the old drives firmware, I ordered a ESata cable and decided to give it a try, I got half way through and my head was swimming, I realized this was way beyond my capability,...Read more

If your xbox 360 has any of the following but not limited to

*xbox 360 recognizes games as dvd's but will not play them
*After game disc inserted Xbox 360 displays open tray error
*Games take longer than usual to load and sometimes they never load all together

This Ben Q drive will fix all your problems and bring your system back to life like when it was brand new.

This replacement drive must be flashed with dvd key from original xbox 360 dvd drive before it will recognize games correctly. The process of flashing should probably be left up to professional installers but it can be accomplished by average users with the right amount of reading.....The program needed to flash is called jungle flasher,it can be googled. The flashing process is not modding the console to play copies, it is just copying the dvd key over to the new drive from the old dvd drive, so it is safe on xbox live and you probably won't be banned from xbox live...Read more

Jesse has a great review of the product so I won't repeat his points. Instead I want to mention that depending on the drive you currently have in your 360 you may be required to do some hardware modification (e.g. soldering) in order to successfully switch to a different drive. If you're not comfortable with that kind of thing I'd check which drive you have in your 360, google for the instructions for Jungle Flasher, and check to see whether or not you'll need to do any hardware mods. If you do, you may want to have a professional swap it out.

Thankfully my drive didn't require any hardware modification and I was able to swap it out (relatively) easily. New drive works great and was well worth the ~$30 to replace my old drive.