Back to old age, when cd burners are slow, and many compatibility problems
exist between OS, system and cd burners, and most important, speed wasn't an
issue, DMA mode might cause problems.  But no longer this statement hold any
value today.  Today's fast burners require DMA enabled to reach their max
speed.  Not only you will loss writing speed, but also reading speed as
well.  PIO only mode is too slow today and without DMA enabled, most burners
won't even burn reliably (buffer underrun kicks in millions of time).  The
only problem I've seen with DMA enabled is that some drives may lost ability
to read certain CDs, but if they failed to such simple task, those drives
are not worth to get.

So in short answer, DMA should be enabled at any time.

Jun Qian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Les Barnes" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 9:25 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] CD-ROM


> In the properties section of my CD-Rom (burner) there is a box called DMA.
Seems to me I read somewhere that this should be unchecked but I can't
remember why. Is there *any* time this should be unchecked? For burning?
Game playing

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