I exchanged the first PS2 I got after a few months. The first model had problems loading a DVD movie (U571) so I freaked out and thought I had got a defect model..
Anyway, later I found out the movie is incompatible with the PS2.. So I replaced a perfectly normal PS2.
So my older PS2 is over 4 years old now.. It still reads games perfectly (no DRE *knocks on wood*), white, gold, blue, black all run fine.
But today I got the newer PSTwo, damn what a nice little thing. It loads/boots the games in a few seconds compared to my old PS2, which could take up to 20 seconds sometime.
I\'ll keep the old one though as I have a hard drive connected to it.