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Quality and Installation of the AOpen DRW4410 |
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A
brief course in setting up a new drive |
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The AOpen DRW4410
comes in an off-white, otherwise plain bezel, with a
matching tray. Along with the company's logo on the
front of the tray are the supported formats, lest one might
forget. Our particular model was manufactured in July 2003,
printed on the upper label along with the serial and part
numbers. The drive felt a bit hefty, weighing in at
just over 2 and a half pounds. Nothing else too
remarkable here.
The front panel
was limited in that in only had an eject button and one LED
indicator. The powered tray slides out, albeit
somewhat slowly, but feels firmly placed within the tracks.
Should a problem occur with the ejection of a CD/DVD, a
small emergency eject hole is placed to the left of the
eject button. A straightened out paper clip can be
entered a few centimeters until the tray unlocks, and then
the tray can be slowly pulled out to remove the problematic
disc.
The back of the
drive had all of the usual IDE and power connections one
would expect. 4 pin MOLEX power cables go in on the
right, and unless forced should only fit one way. The
largest section in the middle is for a 40-pin IDE cable,
with PIN 1 usually designated by a red stripe, placed
closest to the power cable. There are also three
smaller sets of pins towards the left end of the drive.
One set is used for connecting the provided audio cable and
another for designating the drive as Master or Slave by
moving the jumper cap to short the pins.
The drive can be
mounted either horizontally or vertically, in which case the
eject button must be on the upper edge. Usually, this
amounts to finding an open 5 1/4" bay, placing the drive in
the bay until the holes match up, and tightening the four
mounting screws. If the drive is going to be the sole
removable media drive, it's best to place the jumper cap to
Master and have an IDE cable running from the drive to the
secondary IDE port, assuming the hard drive is attached to
the first IDE port. The four pin audio cable runs from
the back of the drive into an awaiting connector on a sound
card or on the motherboard itself. These are usually
labeled CD-In and generally only fit one way. The
final step is to attach the power cable, close the chassis,
and power up your system. Just like that you're in the
movie business!
HotHardware's Testing Setup
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