AOpen is a subsidiary of Acer Corporation, which is one of the bigger Taiwanese conglomerates for making computer hardware. The company has been around for over 20 years making motherboards, video cards, DVD drives and other computer components. Two of my computer components are manufactured by AOpen or Acer, including my motherboard, and the DVD-RW drive I’m reviewing here.

Mass storage has come a long way since the first computers came out. In recent history we’ve gone from 20 MB HDDs in 1990 to the 250 GB monsters available now. Transportable media has evolved from the 1.44 MB floppy disk to the CD-R and CD-RW drives of a couple of years ago. Recently, the CD drives have given way to DVD drives which can hold up to 18 GB of data (but a DVD-RW can hold 4.7).

My last review of a DVD-RW drive was the AOpen 4410, which you can find by clicking this link . The DVD in that review served me in good stead for over 6 months, but 6 months in computer hardware is a long time. When given the opportunity to review AOpen’s new drive I jumped at the chance and upgraded my system at the same time.