Our 12 or 13 year old Wii had been reading discs fine for as long as I remember. Recently when I tried to use it again in 2019, the disc drive continuously failed and would not read Wii nor GameCube games. I then started looking online for a proper disc drive replacement and ran into many different sellers. The seller for this one I believe was HongLei, but they do not always seem to have it in stock as the direct seller. As a result, my replacement drive was sent to me from a 3rd-party seller called Game Console Warehouse. The box it arrived in had the information listed from another seller of these replacement disc drives called abcGoodefg. I have no idea how reliable any of these sellers were, but this one happened to be one of the higher rated sellers, if sold directly from HongLei.When opening up my Wii, I compared the drives very closely to see if I could find anything drastically different, but it appears to be the exact part. Most likely was refurbished, but I can’t really be expecting a “new” Wii disc drive in 2019. Installing it was as simple as just directly swapping out the drives. Very straight forward so long as you have the needed tools for the swap. I was afraid that the drive would not run GameCube games, based on the mixed reviews people had left for this product, but it reads both Wii and GameCube games in my experience. I really liked the backwards compatibility of the Wii with the GameCube, and I’m glad that I can continue to play the older generation games with this replacement. It is very likely/possible that you could receive a drive that does not read GameCube games or anything at all because third party sellers are not always reliable. Only time will tell if this drive has the longevity as our old drive did.
