Whoa! ATA 33???

I have a Lite-On SOHW-1633S DVD writer, and it's been great. I haven't used it in a while though as it doesn't want to burn. My question is why does BIOS show it as an ATA-33? I tried to find the ATA specs it should be at, but had no luck. I thought it was supposed to be ATA-100 at least IIRC. Am I going nuts? Any hints or is this thing toast? Thanks all.

 

Check in Device Manager to see if the IDE port that that it is attached to has been reset to PIO mode instead of DMA.

 

Well, I couldn't see anything like that in there so I took the side off and reseated the data ribbon and now upon bootup, the page flashes by so quick that I can't catch it anymore so something changed. BTW, BIOS reads it as UDMA 2. Weird as this is the second time an apparent ribbon cable issue has gone bust on me, maybe I'll replace the ribbon with a round cable that I can scavenge from an old rig. It also burns too now?:confused

 

Just some useless knowledge for ya. Most older cd drives were built on an udma33 bus because there was no point in making them faster. udma 33 can theoretically do 33MB/sec. A 16x burner only needs roughly 2.4MB/sec throughput to run at a full 16x. Most drive manufacturers weren't going to waste the money to upgrade the bus interface on their drives when they had no need to.