I think it's really only the MiniDV deck that fails on the SR-VS30U, You can actually totally unplug it internally from the power supply and the main board and the VHS side will operate just fine without it being there. Beauty of the SR-VS30U is that a lot of them were probably taken out of service when the miniDV side failed, and there's a good chance that the VHS side wasn't used as much. The SR-VS30U has a loading belt that likes to fail, but it's the easiest ever to change with no tools required after you take the top case off and you can use cheap
Amazon variety pack belts to replace them. The SR-VS30U is less known as having a TBC because there's no button on the outside for it, so you do need the remote to be able to enable/disable it is really the only other slight downside. SR-VS30U is also kind of nice in that it has dual outputs for S-Video and composite, so you could technically capture with two different capture PCs/setups during the same playback both via S-Video, which is nice for comparisons. Even the 7600-99xxu's didn't have the dual S-video outputs.