Could new ATA-133 card mess up sound?

Hiawatha Bray wrote in message
...

I have one of those motherboards with onboard VIA AC'97 sound. It was
working fine, till I recently installed a new Maxtor hard drive. The drive
has the high-speed ATA-133 bus, and since my motherboard only goes up to
ATA-100, I used a PCI card that came with the drive to get the higher speed.

Now whenever the computer is doing serious disk swapping, there's a
little sputtering in the sound. It's fairly noticeable when listening to opera,
for instance. Could the ATA-133 card be overburdening my motherboard?

Not so much 'overburdened' as just not configured properly.

Would a standalone sound card be a good idea,

Nope.

or would it be subject to the same problem?

Yep.

Has anybody even seen anything like this before?

Yep, its not that uncommon.

Make sure DMA is enabled and is being used on the drive.
It should work fine on the motherboard IDE controller too, no
real need for ATA133, the drive wont be saturating ATA100.

"Hiawatha Bray" wrote in message
...
I have one of those motherboards with onboard VIA AC'97 sound. It was
working fine, till I recently installed a new Maxtor hard drive. The
drive
has the high-speed ATA-133 bus, and since my motherboard only goes up to
ATA-100, I used a PCI card that came with the drive to get the higher
speed.

Now whenever the computer is doing serious disk swapping, there's a little
sputtering in the sound. It's fairly noticeable when listening to opera,
for instance. Could the ATA-133 card be overburdening my motherboard?
Would a standalone sound card be a good idea, or would it be subject to
the
same problem? Has anybody even seen anything like this before?

BVasically want to add the same as Rod, but want to underline his last
words. There was not a need for the ATA133-controller in the first place.
Works fine on an ATA100-controller too. Probably better, try and see if
sound disturbance goes away.