I have some Promise ATA133 controllers that work fine. But there is a very long delay at startup while they are detecting the attached drives. This is probably a hard-coded timeout in case the drives require some additional delay to spin up. I have even seen in some motherboard BIOSes options to delay bootup for this very reason, and this is my guess as to why these controllers have such a long delay.

In my case, I'm using CF cards which do not need any delay. And I'm frustrated having to wait for my computer to boot with these controllers when testing, which requires rebooting often.

Are there any reliable IDE controllers for PCI that do not have a delay or have a very short one?

The controllers I have which are slow to boot are made by Promise. I also have Silicon Image adapters which i have found to have buggy BIOS calls and VXD drivers, so this one is not an option either. I do not have anything by Adaptec. Are there any other reputable brands to examine?

See here for information on the Silicon Image controller I tested previously:

Does anyone have any experience with the Silicon Image SiI0680A IDE controller?