Quick Ultra DMA question (NC8430)

Alrighty, so I just received my new NC8430 this morning, been setting it up for the past few hours and I have a question for other NC8430 users.

I noticed that there's only a Primary IDE Controller listed in Device Manager (usually there's a secondary as well, but this is probably normal for this notebook) so I decided to check to see what transfer mode the connected drive/s are running in. For some reason (and I'm thinking that this is the DVD drive I'm looking at here) it's running in "Multi-word DMA mode 2" where usually it would be "Ultra DMA mode X" where "X" is a number corresponding to what level of UDMA it's running at.

Now, it seems to be running fine (and damn snappy too ), but I wanted to make sure that this is normal for this notebook, as I've not seen a drive running in this mode on either a desktop or laptop up till now.

Loving the keyboard so far btw.

 

For whatever reason, HP/Compaq lowers the DMA mode of optical drives in their laptops to the "Multi-word DMA mode 2" even though the drive supports Ultra DMA Mode 2. I have not seen other manufacturers (like Toshiba, Sony, and Acer) do that.

The 16.6MB/s bandwidth (~13MB/s in real world) provided by "Multi-word DMA mode 2" is enough for current laptop optical drives, although the efficiency seems lower than at Ultra DMA Mode 2.