I went digging in my CD/DVD drive stockpile while looking for a SATA DVD drive to put in my 2008 build, when I found this:

From the way it looks, this is a retail drive, but I can't for the life of me find any listings or prices of it ca. late May-June 2008, especially not on Newegg, where they apparently didn't sell any AOpen products, save for a tiny amount of items.

I found another drive that was coincidentally also made in May of 2008, but it was a Dell OEM drive and I couldn't find any listings for it, either. When I search the model number, I get results from two different companies: H&L Data Storage, and also LG. I haven't ever seen that happen before.