I'm 95% sure that my PS3 is suffering a Blu Ray Drive failure but before i splash the cash on a repacement drive I wanna be sure.

Symptoms:

Console switches itself off after x amount of time be it in game,watching a Blu ray or just on the XMB.

A yellow light briefly appears and then the red light flashes indefinitely until I switch the console off manually

Now like I say I'm almost certain this is a Blu ray drive failure and thankfully I'm pretty confident I can install a replace without much hassle. But these aren't cheap to replace.

So yeah can someone confirm to me that these symptoms match my diagnosis?

Thanks!

I had two blu ray drives die on me and the only symptom was that my ps3 could no longer recognize discs. Both times I was playing a game and then the ps3 froze. I didn't get a yellow light or anything like you did so I don't know man..

That just sounds like you're getting the YLOD issue.