Like the other Pioneer drives I've reviewed, the DVR-116D was very easy to install. From start to finish, the entire process took only a few minutes. I took the drive out of its bag, left the jumper set to master and installed it on the secondary IDE chain by connecting the IDE cable and power connector. When I turned on the computer, the BIOS detected it as a drive supporting UDMA 66. After making sure that DMA was enabled in the Device Manager, I was ready to go.
Documentation:
The DVR-116D comes with a set of "Operating Instructions." While not very big, this manual is well laid out and contains a fair amount of useful information. It starts out by going over the features of the DVR-116D. This includes an extensive list of specs as well as a few diagrams showing all of the buttons and connectors on the front and back of the drive. Pioneer has done a great job here as everything is labeled clearly and the functions of each are explained very well.
From there, the manual jumps right into the physical installation of the drive. Unfortunately, this section is very brief and consists mainly of some written instructions and a single diagram showing how the IDE, power and audio cables should be connected. If you're wondering how the jumpers should be configured or how to do things like enable DMA, you're out of luck. You won't find that information in the manual.
In the end, installing the DVR-116D was very easy. The documentation that Pioneer has included with the drive is brief, but should be enough to get the drive up and running. Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen some better installation instructions as well as some information on how to do things like enable DMA. With this in mind, the DVR-116D gets an 8 out of a possible 10 for this section of the review.
