PIO and DMA mode

[BMR]

Looking up the PIO and DMA modes of my drives in the bios ( Asus A7V 266-E motherboard ) has the following listings:

80 Gig hard drive Pio 4 DMA 5
Lg 4040B Pio 4 DMA 2
Liteon 52 24 52 Pio 4 DMA 2

I tried several ways to up the level of the DMA mode on the Lg and Liteon drives but had no success. The system would not boot if the drives were called Other ATAPI device with the DMA mode set to 5 and as soon as I chose AUTO the drives were both sent back to Pio 4 and DMA 2

Is this correct and does this allow the maximum speed possible for data transfers to and from the drives??

The reason I ask, is the slowness with which I notice the LG handles the included 3X DVD-RAM disk, 40 min to write a movie at 3X and 55min to erase the disk fully.


BMR

[CDRecorder]

What your BIOS says is correct; the best DMA mode your optical drives can handle is U-DMA Mode 2. This is more than fast enough, though, as it allows 33.3 MB/s transfer rates, and the optical drive can't transfer data that fast. For example, a 52x CD-RW drive transfers data at a maximum of 7.8 MB/s.

However, if you are seeing poor drive performance in Windows, this may be a result of DMA being disabled in Windows. DMA should always be enabled. See the links below for instructions on enabling DMA in your version of Windows.

Windows XP

Windows 2000

Windows 98 (also works with Windows Me)

[BMR]

Thanks for the info, I will check the DMA status of my drives in
win XP.

BMR

[CDRecorder]

You're welcome. I hope that I was able to help!

[lgmayka]

The reason I ask, is the slowness with which I notice the LG handles the included 3X DVD-RAM disk, 40 min to write a movie at 3X and 55min to erase the disk fully.

I haven't tried to erase the 3x DVD-RAM disk fully, but it does take 40 min to write a full >4GB movie to it. A review of the drive said that this apparent slowdown is due to the default read-after-write strategy. In other words, the 40 min should be compared against the full-write-then-full-read required for integrity by any other format such as DVD+RW.