Yes, it's easy to use. It's just like an ordinary controller.
You don't have to change the bios config.

It's transparent. It works with any drive. If you change the
drive you only need to change the bios config. as usual.

Yes, no problem.

That depends. You will get a little better performance
if you use smartdrive and buffers in addition. That's
because access to the card through the ISA bus is slower
than access to system RAM. I don't use smartdrive myself,
but I have a few buffers.
