The whole point of me writing the above paragraph is to let you know that if the disk drive does fail as mine did, you can replace the disk drive with another unit and not replace the motherboard. The way that the guide is written left me unsure and drove me crazy, but I can tell you with 100% honesty that the disk drive can be replaced, solving the problem.

The most important step is to only replace the failed disk drive, keeping the original daughter board in the system. I'm hoping that this info will prevent any future confusion and you won't need to drive yourself crazy as I did.

When you're done with the repair, you'll have the failed disk drive and a good daughter board to throw away as my new disk drive did come with a daughter board.

If your ps4 motherboard does fail, the only option would be to rebuild data on another ps4 console.

On the base model ps4 that has a 500 gig hard drive, the optical drive has a daughter board that works with the system to let the system know if there is a disk in the drive and what the disk is. This daughter board is paired with the ps4 motherboard. Should the disk drive break, all the user has to do is replace only the disk drive with the exact same unit and the problem should be fixed. Don't replace the daughter board as the system won't recognize another daughter board in it's place. If the daughter board has gone bad, transfer data to another playstation 4 as that will be your only option.

There is no need to replace the ps4 motherboard as motherboards are available anyway. In my case, the new disk drive that I bought can work with either a daughter board labeled as bdp-025 or bdp-020. The daughter board in my ps4 is bdp-020.