Not sure what you are heading towards here.
For some consoles when they became basically PCs then you might find probably quite rare drive models on the PC (one of the ones seen on the 360 was only found in some prebuilt machines) that worked to various degrees (some only for homebrew, some could do commercial games, some might need further hacks to do commercial games). Similar things also available rather than PC drives but maybe contemporary audio players and the like which used the same hardware.
The PS1 was still pretty custom rather than off the shelf so options there are minimal, not to mention contemporary drives are going to be super rare and subject to the same concerns (still going to be 30 something year old hardware where most is considered to have a good life if it lasts 10 years).
From where I sit then today you have two main approaches to consider.
1) ODEs and their like. Optical Drive Emulator or occasionally ODDE (Optical Disc Drive Emulator). These sit on the drive cables (sometimes replacing, sometimes pass through) and spit out signals the console understands but reality is they are rocking hard drives/USB drives/SD cards full of ROMs/images of the CDs.
2) Fun with FPGAs. Technically a similar concept but rather than making a thing to allow you to play 1000 different games you have it speak to the nice SATA DVD drive the other side and spit back signals into the PS1 that it understands.
Playstation ODE work is a bit thin on the ground (as is laser replacement and other things here) as the different models employ sometimes radically different approaches which fragments the market somewhat, with no one model being so popular as to crowd out the others.
I am thus not aware of anything I can point at and say "get this", however it is eminently technologically possible (similar things exist for all manner of later devices and more demanding applications and even in the consumer world rather than turbo nerd using a university's lab gear).
BigOnYa
K3Nv2
Psionic Roshambo
Xdqwerty
