Since Fry's has a bunch of these for $39, I was thinking of getting one if the actual drive is transplantable into my Toshiba A3, in case the drive in that dies. Would this actually work or am I better off just waiting for more cheap players to come along?

Probably won't work as the drive inside is like an internal DVD drive for PC. I actually bought 2 XBox 360 drives and will buy an XBox 360 when they are cheaper. Also I'm able to use the XBox 360 drive on my PC (thru USB connector) with PowerDVD 7 and install of drivers. You'll need a decent PC of course. PM me for more info.

I haven't taken apart my A3, but I've seen some pictures of other units showing that they also use internal PC drives- I saw a YouTube video of someone taking it out and putting it on their computer.

I have a cheap regular DVD player that died which had a few unique capabilities; I tried to put a DVD-ROM drive in that to save it but couldn't do it- too many of the connectors were different.

Won't work. I think Amir commented on this a few years ago when people thought of replacing the DVD drive inside of their 360 with the HD DVD version.

I have a 360 drive 'just because'.