Installing Homebrew on your Wii is really easy and painless, why don't you want to? I was also kinda against it, but once I did, it's not very noticeable and it adds great functionality to the Wii.
As for getting an old drive ,I just put the first drive from the dvd drive thread into ebay and got this result
As for getting an old drive ,I just put the first drive from the dvd drive thread into ebay and got this result