Well we finally have been able to get supply of new BenQ VAD6038 Xbox 360 DVD drive. The reason we are excited about the BenQ VAD6038 is for a few reasons, firstly it’s the quietest out of all the 360 drive types found in consoles. An Elite console with a BenQ VAD6038 is substantially quieter then an Elite console that comes with the Hitachi drive. Another major reason we prefer the BenQ VAD6038 because of it’s build quality and simplicity of design, there is much less that can go wrong with them when compared to the function and design of the other drives. In fact Microsoft has contracted BenQ to exclusively produce all the DVD drives used in 360 productions from now on, the last of the Hitachi 79 drives will be used up soon and all consoles coming from the different production plants will be coming with the BenQ VAD6038. Another good thing about these drives is the fact that new lasers are easy to come by, so eventually when the laser starts to become week and your disks are not longer reading like they used to, it won’t be a problem finding new lasers for these drives, and at a decent price too may we add.
For the guys installing the BenQ VAD6038 the other big bonus is the fact that it can support bad flash recovery using dos flash, none of the other drives have this ability and it is a great safety measure to avoid costly mistakes when a bad flash occurs. If the power goes out while flashing the drive, or communication between the pc and the drive fails for whatever reason during a flashing, you are able to just use dos flash to erase the bad flash and start the procedure over again. This is something the other drives do not possess, in short a built in safety mechanism that means no longer having to remove the tsop from the board to recover a bad flash. Once understood, the BenQ VAD6038 is a much easier drive to be working with in regards to flashing when compared with the Sammy or Hitachi, there is stealth and non stealth firmwares for the Benq drives available as well. In all, we believe that if you’re repairing Xbox 360 consoles and need a solid Xbox 360 replacement DVD drive, the BenQ VAD6038 is the best option out there to date.
Warning:
These drives are not just a pull the old one out and put the new one in solution unfortunately, there are procedures to extract a key from the old drives bios file, and then the need to imbed this key into the new drives firmware file. This is a procedure that should only be performed if you’re already experienced in flashing 360 drives. If you don’t have any experience with flashing, you will have to buy the drive and take it to someone that knows how to flash and repair Xbox 360 consoles. If you are in Australia and your old drive has died or on the way out, please check out installer list for people around the country that can provide this repair service for you. Also note that if your drive is just having problems reading discs, you might be able to get away with just a laser replacement. This requires a soldering iron, but is much easier then installing a new drive, changing drives in a 360 is basically a last resort as a repair option.
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