QUOTE(jameswalter @ Jul 13 2006, 08:21 PM)

No. It's not the drive thats locked to the region, its the console motherboard.
While it is true that the drive itself is region free, when plugged into a PC via sata it reports itself as whatever region the inserted media is. ie a region free game will report the drive as set to "none set" and a region 2 disc will report the drive as "region 2 with region 2 disc". So there could be a way to get the firmware to always report itself as what ever the region motherboard is and allow for region free gaming.
I hope so anyway.