Replacing the SCPH-1001 CD drive

[Tommy]

Backstory: I haven't owned a PlayStation for about a decade. I bought one in pursuit of this hobby. Being useless at soldering, I therefore needed a modded one. It's an SCPH-1001*. Per the desire to avoid crazy prices, I went to Craigslist rather than eBay. The seller warned me it was a little temperamental.

That's mostly correct but sometimes it's exceedingly temperamental. Attached is a recording of it attempting to boot a CD I just wrote — completely unscratched, boots often enough to confirm it's written correctly, but sometimes this happens. The transcribed version would be five separate clicks before the logo noise ends, then a long pause (while the BIOS opens), then thirteen more clicks in the time I continued to record. I stopped 36 seconds after power on. The disc eventually booted.

Part of my calculation in buying this machine was that it looks like replacing the drive unit is significantly easier than adding a mod chip. It's a five screws to get inside, then a few more plus a couple of cables to release the unit, then all that again in reverse. Units seem to start around $10 on eBay, even if I restrict sellers to those physically in the US.

Is that all accurate? If so can anyone advise on specific laser models? I can't seem to find much info on this other than vague mentions that some won't quite fit and, with an SCPH-1001, some won't have ribbon cables quite long enough. Conversely, later ones may be more durable than earlier ones.

So what am I looking for? Options seem to include at least the KSM440-AEM, the ADM and the BAM.

Has anyone else swapped their drive mechanism? Was it as trivial as I think?

(* giving me my first ever viewing of the US BIOS. Yuck! But at least it's the closest thing I can get here to the SCPH-1002 I had back in the day)

[Shadow]

The audio from your recording tells me that the eye is trying to focus but it simply can't lock to the height it needs. You will need to adjust the laser strength using the pot on the side found on the ribbon cable. If not, an entire drive replacement is in order, and I highly recommend it since all of drives in the 100x series have died already.

I recently replaced my 1002 drive (440ACM) with one from a 9002 (440AEM). The drives feet needed to be cut off using some pliers (they snapped cleanly off the plastic), the top cover also needs to be swapped and the ribbon cable needs to be folded since it is quite long. You may also want to swap the drive motor since they usually go bad too (mine was okay though so I didn't bother). Make sure you completely disassemble the 440AEM from the 9002 and clean the optics carefully with alcohol and cotton tips (q-tips) as well. If you don't want to do all of that, you can either buy a replacement from eBay or try and re-mould a new plastic frame since that is the reason why they break (the friction sands the plastic away, literally).



Playing a entire game of Crash Bandicoot will break your laser:

Code: Select all

"The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!

Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!

Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash.
- See more at: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-crash-bandicoot-part-5/#sthash.Ir07OlCH.Jw52GnTI.dpuf"

[BABYMETAL1997]

Would a KSM-440BAM drive work with the SCPH-1001?

[alexfree]

Would a KSM-440BAM drive work with the SCPH-1001?

Yes, I've done that exact swap. You need to swap the top case of the CD drive itself (the plastic piece held in by 2 phillips #00 screws that goes over the interal gears and around the laser sled) with one from a KSM-440ACM or KSM-440AAM so that when you assemble the console it fits together. The newer CD drive models have a very slightly different shape that prevents them from being used with the early consoles unless you swap the top case of the CD drive itself onto the newer model drive.

The "new" ebay drives are garbage. I've wasted too much money on those trying to get them to work. Your best option is to pull a cd drive from a working unit and put it in the target console you want to use. Alternatively you can try to refurbish the drive, I wrote a guide on that: https://alex-free.github.io/unofficial- ... ice-manual if you can't find a working unit as is. The "new" eBay drives that are sold as KSM-440ACMs also have the updated CD drive top case shape which prevent then from actually fitting in an early console as is to make it worse. They are total scams.