I had a Saturn, used to boot backups using the swap-trick method for a few years until it died, amazingly, it wasn't the motor, it appeared to be one of the VDPs failing.
You have to really suck at the disc swap method to destroy the motor. The motor gets destroyed by you holding the disc down and preventing the spindle from spinning. The proper way to do it is to place your finger under the disc and quickly, in a fluid motion, flick the disc out of the tray. Completely minimal amount of time you're gonna have contact with the spindle. Of course, the smart way to do it now is just to emulate the saturn. Speaking of which, does anybody know if there is a version of NiGHTS which works with SSF? Every time I rip mine, it hangs at the boss battle. EDIT: Phos, you went to Sega Xtreme as well? I used to converse with Pinchy back when I went there (many, many years ago). I think he walked me through replacing a fuse on my dreamcast back before the cause of dead controller boards was widely known.
Run it from a mounted image, and not a physical disc. Some PC drives mess up timing and cause games to hang in SSF. Nights hanging at bosses is the most common example for it.
