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I know I just noted just the other day how painless the install was and so forth, praising the Ultra133 card. Well, it took about a day for me to run into some major difficulties. Essentially as hinted here and here, the card DOES NOT support ATAPI optical units, i.e. DVD writers and reader. It never has and it never will. It reports Ultra DMA 2 for the NEC 3540A writer (4 for the Pioneer 106 reader) but effectively operates the drives in PIO mode. Which means that burning a single DVD5 is going to take about 40 min and slow your computer to a crawl. Reading seems a tad slow too but it doesn’t compare to writing.
Also, the drive detection at boot time take 10+ seconds. Seems like the unit is just frozen or something. I have installed the latest drivers and bios of course but to no avail. The boot screen also notes that “BIOS is not installed because there are no drives attached.” I.e. no HARD drives. This is normal but it indicates that for optical drives, the card isn’t really playing ball and is more of an obstacle. Crummy.
The only solution to the slow ATAPI problem is to only populate the card bus with HDD units. Effectively running optical units off of the mainboard controller. And even then, I hear HDD compatibility is bad, offering a considerably slower access in some cases. Bottom line, the Ultra133 is quite a gamble, and what I’d really like to see is a fresh PATA controller card, that isn’t dated 2003.
