First off I hope this helps others who may face similar issues or be wondering whether their NF590 C51XEM2AA will support the AD-7170S...
Mobo Review
Background
Built a new rig on a NF 590 SLi, did clean install of XP SP2 & found the installation of the Nvidia SW IDE wasn't too popular with the OS - slowdowns etc. So I formatted & started again. OS was now using 2600-2180 drivers for IDE & SATA interfaces. (SP2 RTM resident)
Dropped in the AD-7170S & it was instantly found & dramatically improved system boot time over the IDE LG it replaced.
Drive happily wrote 2x MCC 03RG20's at 18x with no errors.
Then I try to burn something after the MS Updates of Aug 14 -
Microsoft security updates Summaries for August 2007
& end up with weird drive behaviour & coasters.
Under Nero 7 the drive would register 1% for the first 1:30 mins then move up to 3% before rolling back to 0% then jumping to 27%, 37% & 49% during the 1st 3 mins, then Nero hangs & HDD activity stops. The DVDRW would retain a green activity light even when I hit the reset button - (system was completely unresponsive & giving BIOS beeps when I tried to do anything.) The only way to regain control of the drive was to completely power down the PC, then I could extract the coaster & start over.
The hard reset wouldn't recover the drive! 
Using the simulate write ability of Nero I was able to see a variety of errors - DMA & block addressing faults.
So I'm thinking defective drive. Bad media. Firmware... 
I use it under Vista64 & its working OK - won't actually achieve 18x - tho it says it is writing at 18x, it takes 14 mins - so it isn't... 
3 types of media all fail/trashed in similar ways.
Update firmware from 1.0 to 1.02 & no change.
I reluctantly decide to try the SW IDE again & thats the end of the problem. Using the 6.67 driver in pack 9.35 I suddenly get perfect performance & none of the previous issues in WinXP. 
So my question to the experts is what the hell happened? The patches were the only installation between the drives' initial use & the day of hair-pulling.
Anyone identify what those updates did to the drive controllers? |
Posted:
21-08-2007
