Dma

[pontious]

To DMA or not to DMA?
Should the DMA box be checked or not for IDE devices. I have heard two different stories but would appreciate the lowdown on whether it needs to be or not and what the results would be.

[LaZorMan]

Best is to make a test. If you enable DMA and all works then use it. It is a way to speed up data transfer and can sometimes prevent Buffer Underrun. But as pokopiko mentioned..you´ll never know the improvement level. It could be as low as zero.

LaZorMan

[noygdb]

i have a soltek sl-75kav motherboard
amd atholon 1000mhz
640 meg of pc133 ram
and a plextor 24x10x40
and without dma it took ages to burn a cd ( eg 23 mins for 650meg of data at 12x write )
with dma for hardrive and burner the same data took only 10 mins which was a vast improvement for me
only thing i can say is try it if no good put it back
hope this helps

[madmax]

I also had a vast improvement with DMA enabled on my Plextor 12x10x32. I especially noticed it when ripping audio CDs. Without I had rip speeds of around 8x. With I could get up to 20x so I leave it on. I also notice an improvement in DVD playback with DMA enabled on my DVD Rom. I say leave it on if it doesn't cause you any problems.

[Dan_Gray]

Reading these threads I'm interested in applying DMA for my CD-RW as I can only rip mp3s at 8x. How would I go about turning on the dma setting using Windows XP Pro?


Please let me know. Cheers In advance


Dan

[madmuppet]

What about the synchronised data box should it be checked or not and will it improve performance?

[headache1]

mostly positive comments about DMA being on... so why isn't it always enabled? what sort of problems might occur if DMA is on?

i have a 12x8x32 cdrw that i'm trying to debug. it is physically installed and shows up in device manager as functioning properly. i can read from it, but it's not writing to it. when i perform a test, the simulation starts, then stops with a "diagnostic failure" warning.

the DMA setting is enabled and i'm using nero 5572. would this cause any problems? i've tried writing at 6x, 4x, and 2x and always the same problem.