Hi. New and a question about GSA-H22L drive

Hi,

I got one of these for Christmas this year. I just installed it and am having a couple of problems that I'm hoping someone could help me with. For reference, it is 06-08-05 and has firmware 1.00 on it.

First of all, my computer is a homebuilt. It's got an intel D915PBL motherboard with a P4 3.0 gig processor, one gig of RAM and one SATA hard drive. I've always had problems with the USB ports on this motherboard suddenly quitting, particularly with my bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so I have an additional USB card plugged in.

If I plug a storage device of any kind into the USB, any other storage devices plugged in turn on, sync up or whatever. This includes my removable hard disk, my flash drives, my iPod and my palm pilot. It doesn't really cause any problems, it's just kind of annoying. I've noticed that if I have my portable hard drive connected and I put a disc into either of my DVD burners, then the drive is activated. Is there anything I can do about it, or is this normal?

My motherboard has has one IDE port because it also has SATA. I have the two DVD burners connected to it, one as master, one as slave. Last night I downloaded and burned a copy of Nero 7 to a DVD using the newer burner (the LG GSA-H22LI I got for Christmas) on the slave. When I tried to run the CD on the newer burner, I got a windows error. When I ran it on the older burner (Plextor PX-716A), it ran fine. So, I took an older program I had, ripped it and burned it to DVD using the newer burner. When I ran this one, I got an out of memory error, but it ran find on the older burner. Is this something wrong with the newer burner, or something wrong with my setup.

Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea, I do legally own a copy of Nero 7 Ultra Edition. I just wanted to test out my new DVD burner.

Is this a good drive? I've seen some posts here praising it, but I've also seen some indications ones with firmware 1.01 are better for various reasons.

Thanks

Edit: An update. I removed my Plextor and just had the LG in. When I did that, everything worked fine. Then I put the Plextor back in, but made it the slave and the LG the master. I had the same problem with the LG that I had when it was the slave.

I also swapped out the IDE cable with another one. Same problem.

So it's looking like this might be a problem with my system. I wonder if it's something OS related that I can fix.

One other question. The serial number on the box starts with 608 which coincides with this being 06-08-05. Does this mean that if I wanted one with firmware 1.01, I'd go search for a drive that has numbers corresponding to when they were built?