AOpen 1640 PrO vs. Pioneer 105s (16X Slot Load DVD Drives)

[gr8snakee]

I want a slot loader. There is about 10 dollars difference between these. According to www.cdspeed2000.com the aopen is the better model. any insight from the wonderful people of anandtech. Thank you in advance. Ive been researching this and havent found much info. Also the AOPEN is extremely hard to find, especially at amazon or buy.com or egghead. sux too cause i got a gc at buy and amazon. Im looking to save some money here...but not at the expense of a poor choice. I dont care about DAE and stuff. I have a teac 540 drive that takes care of that and a plexi 12x w/burnproof. Thank you for all of your help.

 

[vulejo]

buy.com has Acer 1640 dvd drive for $112, i think Acer and AOpen are sister companies so the drives *should* be the same. not too sure though, u should do some research to make sure

 

[Noriaki]

AOpen is part of the Acer group. So is ALi...there are a few others, I don't understand the relationship exactly but they are all grouped together...I can't verifty that the Acer and AOpen DVD drives are the same, but I would think that they would be.

Unles you are set on slot load you should check out the Toshiba 12x SD-M1402-S. 12x won't make the slightest difference since movies use only 1x and there is very very small DVD usage outside movies.

The Toshibas are very reliable and quiet, and I heard that the slot load mechanism is less reliable than tray load.


Having said that I have a slot load 10x pioneer and i think it rocks, thought it might be kind of loud I can't tell (my power supply's fan is very loud and drowns out anything else, even my 2 26CFM YS Tech fans)

 

[Linh]

I've had nothing but bad experiences with the Pioneer scsi slot loads. I'd stick with the Toshiba.

 

[Shaka]

Hello,

I just bought an Acer 16x dvd drive. Sadly, it is not an AOpen slot loader. So beware, the Acer 1640A is not the 16x AOpen drive. I'm also having troubles getting this Acer drive to work in Win2k. Some odd business with my cdrom/dvd drivers. Says Win2k can't load the correct drivers for my drive. I wish I bought a Toshiba...

 

[gr8snakee]

i jujst bought the aopen 16 slot loader from essentials in NY. www.essencom.com
it was about 130. heard much better things about this one compare to the pioneer slot loader. anyways if anyone is interested they had the pioneer for 92 plus shipping, about 104. not bad either. thanks for all the replys. i knew the acer and aopne were not the same because i went to aopens usa site. one is slot one is tray. im picky! thanks again

 

[billabong]

The older aopen DVD drives were simply rebadged pioneer drives, I'm not sure about the news models though. My 6 speed SCSI pioneer is just starting to die on me. Been a great drive served me well. Had a toshiba before was far to noisy. Probably going to get the 10 speed SCSI Pioneer now to replace mine.

 

[ruckb]

I thought also, that the AOPEN are the same drives as the Pioneer.
I have the Pioneer 16x 105 slot loading DVD in my System. If you can give me some infos about the Aopen I can check with my pioneer drive!

ruckb

 

[gr8snakee]

will do when it arives. i went to cdspeed200 dot com to check the reviews on both drives.

 

[Fisher999]

I have the Pioneer DVD-115 (tray load model) and it's a GEM. It's coupled with Sigma Design's REALMagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card.

BTW, even as a CD-ROM drive it ROCKS!!!