Laptop DVD drives life expectation is about two years. After that depending on the use it will start to fail to read some DVD or CD disk that are scratched. This is the first symptom that the DVD drive has become weak. What would be symptoms of failing DVD drive:

    Not reading DVD or CD disks  especially when they are scratched.
    Laptop or Deskto not booting from inserted CD or DVD disk
    Windows sometimes display message that it can’t read from the disk
    Can’t write do the disk or can’t finish or close the disk
    Sometimes Windows shows that the disk is not accessible
    Faulty DVD drives usually are not recognised by the operating system
    Faulty drives also sometimes are not recognised by system bios.

Almost all DVD drives are interexchangeable. There are now two biggest types of DVD drive interface which are IDE and SATA. This is not the standard IDE interface but in real a smaller modification of it designed for DVD drives.
SATA interface is the proper SATA as founf on the hard disks.
To replace DVD drive following simple steps that involve just unscrewing usually one screw that holds the drive. The screw usually is logated underneah the laptop. Sometimes it is covered by plastic lid that necessary to remove in this case. Just use the philips screw driver to unscrew all the screws holding the lid , remove the lid and find the screw holding DVD drive. Usually it is very small screw silve color.
Removing the drive and the interface will probably look like this … or like this...