Best place to buy Wii optical drives?

[flamepanther]

There's nothing wrong with my drive, except by design. It's one of the newer ones that will not read any sort of burned disc, even with soft mods. I need a solderless solution, and WODE seems like overkill when all I want is to run Gamecube backups without a cheat disk or special memory card. What I'd like to do is install an older model drive from before the lockouts were so severe. It looks like Deal Xtreme used to have them but sold out. Suggestions?

[gtmtnbiker]

Maybe you can wait for emu_kidid's next version of sd-boot? I don't know when it'll be out but you'll be able to run many cube games from an SD card. Otherwise, you'll just need to find a used one on Craigslist or Ebay.

[Ziggy]

They make solderless mod chips now and I believe they're compatible with the newer drives. DriveKey or WiiKey Fusion. They say they're compatible with "DMS, D2A, D2B, D2C, D2C-2, D2E, D3 and D3-2" drives. Does this not include your drive?

[eSPy]

there are some for sale on dealextreme. no idea how they compare to the one you have though.
http://www.dealextreme.com/advsearch.dx ... eRange.t/0

[flamepanther]

Those might be good alternatives to what I was planning on. I'll have to do some more research. Thanks guys!

[flamepanther]

OK, SD-Boot isn't going to be what I'm looking for, since I would need to have an SD Gecko as one of the GC memory cards, and have a disc present in the drive. Might come back to that option if every other reasonable alternative fails to work out for me. Gonna research those newer solderless mod chips. The last time I looked into those, D3-2 was immune to chipping... but if that's changed and the chips are cheaper than a new drive, then maybe that's my solution. If the drive is cheaper, I might as well go that route like I was planning.

[gtmtnbiker]

OK, SD-Boot isn't going to be what I'm looking for, since I would need to have an SD Gecko as one of the GC memory cards, and have a disc present in the drive.

It's $4 from DealExtreme.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.3993

[Ziggy]

The DriveKey and WiiKey Fusion both say they work with D3-2 drives.

[flamepanther]

Cost is not the issue with the Gecko method. I just want to run backups in as few steps as possible.

I did some research into the WiiKey, and there's an asterisk (*) next to the statement that it works with D3-2 drives. It says on those drives it works with SD features only. I don't know how that impacts GC games, since the internal SD is unreadable in Cube mode. As far as Wii backups, I could already do that from SD with a soft mod if I wanted.

I'll do more research into the Drive Key, but the official site indicates that it works with "D3-nothing" (ie not D3-2) so I haven't got my hopes up.

[Ziggy]

No, the WiiKey Fusion has it's own little SD card reader. It doesn't use the Wii's card reader.