From the second or so revision PSP there were different PCB revisions that would behave differently with the same software.
The earliest anomaly I remember was the TA-082 hardware which by the enclosure, was not distinguishable from other units,
but if you downgraded it below 2.5 firmware, it would brick (before even the first unbricking with battery & MS came about).
I wrote a pretty famous at the time program called X-Flash which customised wallpapers, text, audio samples, and other stuff,
before Sony included any mechanism to do the same in their XMB menu. It wasn’t till about 2.0 you could customise much.
TA-082 hardware could not run that program, and I ended up having to detect it and exit the program just in case.
That, and as already mentioned, your NAND will have data pertaining to some other serialised components on the board.