Drives > AOpen Drives > by Optical Storage

Advantages: Fast reading speed for CD-RW and CD-R formats
Disadvantages: Creates a lot of noise during use

...to the ear, unfortunatly the AOpen 956E does not provide this, in my oppion the device is noisy and sounds like its ripping your disc appart, but if sound is not on your buying list this product is a good cheap alternative to other brands or as a replacement. Also the design is one that I personelly think fits any modern computer in any colour as the pakage comes with a a variety of fronts in different colours silver, black and the one featured in ... Read review

Advantages: Cheap and reliable
Disadvantages: Cost me a lot of money by destroying my computer

Okay, i'll start by just giving a few details about the drive. It can read DVDs at 16x, which means that it can read data 16 times faster than is needed just to play a DVD film and it can read CDs at 48x, 48 times faster than is required to play CDs. The one I had came with my first computer and worked fine, it read CDs and DVDs without any trouble and was even able to read some badly-written CDRs than only CD writers are usually good enough to read. ...
...drives do. The drive has an IDE interface and an internal audio header for connecting to a sound card. Here comes the horror story though, so settle down with some cocoa and a cookie. Ever since I bought my computer, it randomly locked up on a regular basis, usually whenever I used it to play games, so I assumed it was just overheating or something and put more fans in. That didn't help, so I thought that maybe the power supply unit that was provided ... Read review

Advantages: Reads many formats, cheap
Disadvantages: TOO FAST!

...of CD ROMs. Now this AOpen 52x IDE CD ROM is perfect. It reads every thing. Including CD-RW! It is fairly silent running. It came at a very affordable price, and at great speeds. 7800k/s. Which is quite fast. I am pleased with this buy, and well what more can I say? That's probably as good as a CD-ROM can get nowadays! The only thing this CD ROM doesn't do, is write CDs, or play DVDs, which can be done with other drives that come at a higher price. ... Read review

Advantages: Quality, playback, slot loading
Disadvantages: None noticed

This DVD drive is a good little unit, and was more reasonably priced than the Pioneer 10x which looks very similar..!! I've thrown all sorts of media at this drive including many brands of CD-RW etc and it has coped with them all. DVD playback is superb, no faults i can mention. Installation was very easy. very little to do in the sense of setting it up, but this is generally the same with most DVD drives. There is a little jerkyness on ejection ...
...there have been no problem other than that. The new faster breed of DVDs have now come out, with no apparent use so far so hopefully it should be possible to get one of these older units cheaper, which would be well worth the money. I'll recommend this unit to anyone. ... Read review

Advantages: Very cheap, intelligent electronics keep wasted disks to a minimum
Disadvantages: None so far. How long can something this cheap last?

...purchase, but it’s replacement, an AOpen CRW5224, is only costing me a shade over £30 (yes thirty!) from www.dabs.com, AND it’s got a maximum write speed to CD-R of 52x, making full CD copies possible in just a few minutes, and I do mean a few. AOpen may well be more familiar to you as the makers of motherboards. Even if this machine only lasts the 12-month guarantee period and no longer, it’ll only cost me 66p a week to own (as for the DVD player, ...
...WORK FOR ME? The AOPen 5224, being a very recent model may give you one other headache. Can your 2-year-old CD-burning software recognise it? Just to make sure, I visited the Roxio homepage to see if any updates to my Easy CD-Creator 5.0 Platinum were available. As a precaution, I went the whole hog and took not only the main update download, but also, a minor one dated 11/09/2003, which claimed to add still more models to the software’s compatibility ... Read review