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Disc drives

Sell a console with a dead disc drive.

It will not take discs, will not read them, or sounds like a coffee grinder. That is a price, and a smaller one than most people expect.

A disc drive is the single most common thing to fail on a modern console, and it is also the failure people most overestimate. A disc edition with a dead drive is worth roughly what a digital edition is worth, not what a broken console is worth, because everything else in the machine still works perfectly.

That is a much smaller gap than the panic suggests. The drive is a few hundred rand of difference, not a few thousand, and plenty of buyers genuinely do not care because they buy everything from the store anyway.

The one thing worth being precise about: tell us it is the drive rather than letting it come through as a working disc edition. A one-minute declaration keeps the number you were quoted.

Every one of these has two numbers.

What it is worth working, and what it is worth faulty. Both are real, both are yours in about a minute, and both depend on the actual console rather than a best case printed on a page. That is why the number lives in the calculator and not in a table here.

Will not accept a disc

Pushes it back out or refuses it

Takes discs, will not read

Spins and gives up

Will not eject

Often with a disc still inside

Extremely loud when reading

Still works, still a deduction

Drive removed entirely

Tell us, it prices as digital

Drive replaced from another console

Often unpaired, say so

Upgrading?

Then you are not really selling. You are part-paying.

If the drive never mattered to you, moving to a digital console costs less than replacing like for like. Trade-in credit adds 12% toward either.

Take the payout as EpicDeals.co.za credit instead of cash and we add 12% on top. That is us paying you for not needing the money in your account today, and it costs you nothing if you were going to spend it here anyway.

The 12% is only worth taking if you were going to spend it. If you need the cash, take the cash, and we will not make the voucher hard to refuse.

What actually moves the number.

It prices as a digital console, not as a broken one

This is the headline and it is the good news. Everything else works, so the deduction is the drive rather than the machine. People routinely expect a fraction of the real number here.

Say whether there is a disc stuck inside

It happens constantly and it is worth mentioning, partly so we do not open the box to a surprise and partly because if it is a game you wanted back, we would rather return it than keep it by accident.

A swapped PS5 drive is usually unpaired

PS5 drives are paired to the console's board, so a drive taken from another PS5 generally will not work even though it physically fits. If somebody has already tried this repair, tell us, because it changes what we find.

Everything else is still priced normally

Model, storage, condition, controllers and box all count exactly as they would on a working console. A PS5 Slim with a dead drive still beats an original PS5 in perfect order.

Things that do not disqualify it.

Every one of these lowers the offer. Not one of them ends it. Pick the matching condition, say what is wrong in the notes, and the price you are shown already accounts for it.

  • Will not accept a disc at all
  • Accepts discs but never reads them
  • Reads some discs and not others
  • Will not eject, with or without a disc inside
  • Grinding, whirring or clicking on load
  • Drive removed or swapped from another console
  • Ejects on its own at random

Three ways to take the money.

Cash

Instant offer

Assessed within 1-3 working days of arriving, paid within 5 working days of your offer being confirmed.

+12%

Trade-in voucher

Take it as credit on EpicDeals.co.za instead and we add 12%. Useful if the plan was always to upgrade.

+10%

Consignment

We list it, we sell it, you get 10% more than the instant offer. Most sell within 13 days.

Paid to South Africans for their old tech

R107,547,826

Counting live for Epic Deals, since 2013

Trading since 2014 as Epic Deals, with 2,500+ reviews and 30 people who answer the phone. Not a stranger with a bakkie and a WhatsApp number.

console with a broken disc drive questions.

Very close to it, and that is the honest answer rather than a generous one. The rest of the machine is untouched, so it prices as a digital console with a small allowance for the repair. Considerably more than people expect when they use the word broken.

One minute, one number.

No account, no obligation, no salesperson phoning you at supper time.