by focus on Wed Nov 27, 2002 5:58 pm
A rather lengthy post to to help you wile away the time before you fall asleep from too much turkey......
I posted earlier asking if anyone knew anything about this drive. Thank you Sonyman for the response. Sorry about being abit gamey, but I wanted to possibly read about anyone elses experiences before I posted mine.
I bought one of these babys about two weeks ago at Officemax. $89.99 minus $30.00 instant RB minus $30.00 mail-in RB.... $29.99 when all is said and done, $59.99 if I get stiffed on the mail end. Either way, not bad, since my 8x ricoh (good, but b4 burn-proof) and 12x plextor (no coasters, but slow at todays speeds) each ran in the $300.00 dollar range when I got them.
When I got home and removed the drive from the box the first thing I noticed was the faceplate of the drive is totally devoid of any identifiers or logos, not even the standard "disc" logo. Then I notice that the serial number on the drive itself is not even close to the one on the box. Now I'm thinking that if I have to take this baby back the 'Max people are gonna accuse me of trying to scam them since there is no coordination between anything on the box with anything on the drive label. Further inspection of the label reveals that it is actually an Aopen 48/12/50 (hold on Sonyman, you were only wrong by chance).
Sure enough, I hook it up and the problems begin. The drive is recognized by windows as "48x12x50" (w/o any reference to Aopen), firmware 1.01. Nero recognizes the drive but when I try to burn I get a multitude of errors the likes of which I have never seen before. Ok off to the internet.
Verbatim lists their support page as under construction, and although the page sports a driver link it is not enabled. They do give an 800# for free support however. Before I call though I check out Cendyne's page as Verbatim is part of that company. Plenty of support there, but at this time only for Cendyne branded drives. I call Verbatim and actually talked to someone the first try!!! First off I asked him if they shipped Aopen OEM's for this drive and he said that they did among others. When I explained the problem he told me that he would look for updated Verbatim firmware or else have me send it back to them and they would ship me a lite-on instead. When I told him that I found updated firmware on the Aopen page he said that should work as well. In closing, he said he's send me an email in 2-3 days.
It's been 2 weeks. And the Aopen firmware upgrade does not work on OEMs.
I actually got the drive working for a bit and it worked rather well. Then it crashed at the end of a burn...hard. Reboot.....First Nero couldn't find it. Then the Bios couldn't find it. I've got 1 day left to have my rebate request postmarked. I hook my plextor back up to make sure its not the cable or or the port, it worked fine. I sigh and box up the Verbatim. I give the internet one more chance. Verbatims page is still under construction (in fact yesterday & today it is "not found", which could either mean its just about ready or they scrapped the idea entirely).
But Cendyne has redone their page and guess what, it now offers a DL for the OEM Aopen drive. I unboxed the drive, got the bios to find it and flashed. It worked!! The drive has performed well so far, burning 40x Fuji @ 48x flawlessly. It is performing better mechanically as well.
I quickly got my rebate cupie in the mail. I figure if it crashes again anytime soon I'll ship it back for the lite-on (It has a 1-year war.).
In closing, I would say that if you can get it for around $30.00 like I did its worth a shot now that the Aopen firmware has surfaced. If you get the Aopen, I would do the flash first thing, as there is no way I could recommend this drive with the 1.01 FW. From the way the tech talked, it appears that it is more common to get the lite-on anyway, which may be better still.
Enjoy your nap!!!
