Gsa-4120b problems in External 2.0 enclosure

hi,
I'm running an IBM A20m 700mhz p3 laptop, I bought an LG gsa-4120b internal ide drive and it came in an external usb 2.0 enclosure. I bought a pcmcia usb 2.0/ 1394 combo card. I'm running XP.
I have the latest Nero In the nero dvd test the drive won't even work with dvd's at all. On the nero cd test it only records at 5x, and when I burn a cd on a TDK cdr it takes 50 minutes for a 700mb disk. (including verification). It will only work if I plug into my USB 1.0 port. When I plug it into the combo card it will not work at all. The usb 2.0 card came with ALI drivers, but the card doesn't really have a brand. I'm using A111 firmware on my LG drive.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? How can I get this to work?
I don't think it's a media problem because the drive can barely read dvd's or cd's at all!

here is what my drive looks like:
http://www.gogocity.com/product_deta...O07CDR100LG12X

update- The drive does play DVDS and Burn's TDK 4x dvd's at 4x (however it takes over an hour to burn and verify a 1gb data cluster.) The drive is ripping a cd at a maximum of 5x in audiomp3maker 1.13. This sucks. If anyone has any suggestions or help please let me know. I was hoping that the firmware upgrade to a111 would solve my problems but it isn't. I was also pissed to find out that the region code can only be changed 4 times. What a joke.