I think this is sheer old age. I've had this drive since shortly after it went on sale (early 2010), and it was fine for about the first eight years, but since then has been failing like this more and more often. Repeated reinsertions often fix it, or a poweroff of the drive, but it's a right drag.
Frankly, this drive is both old, was fairly cheaply made even when it was new, and is by modern standards very slow (I don't think it's riplocked: I think it's just not capable of reading at more than 11MiB/s no matter what, which equates to about 2.5x on blurays. DVDs see the same peak data rate: it's a reasonable data rate for DVDs, which is probably what most of the hardware was originally designed for back in the 2000s). It's well past time to replace it. I have no idea why anyone would buy a ten year old bluray drive unless they were desperately short of money, or it was mis-sold to them without a warning that this drive is bordering on prehistoric. (Still having one because they've had it for eleven years and it still kind of works is a different matter.
)
I don't know how long it's been since the thing was manufactured. I can see no sign of any firmware for it later than 2013 (for the versions built in to now-antique Vaios).
