On 24 Oct 98 at 9:14, Sami Al-Mohssen wrote:

> i keep reading in some of the magazines that enabling the DMA on the HD or
> the CD-ROM should increase the performance of the device.
>
> how do i enable DMA mode for my HD or my CD-rom

  In order to do this, you need too things:

1.  Your drives must support UDMA.  UDMA drives will work as IDE/EIDE
drives, but the reverse is not true.

2.  Your motherboard chipset must support UDMA.  Most boards
currently being sold do.


  If both of these conditions are met, UDMA will generally be enabled
automatically.  Some CMOS setup utilities offer the opportunity to
set PIO or UDMA modes on a drive-by-drive basis, but this should
usually be left to its default "AUTO" setting.
  Occasionally, the AUTO setting is a little too agressive, and so
one might use the BIOS to slow things down by one or two steps, but
I've never heard of a case (doesn't mean it couldn't happen) where
the AUTO setting was less agressive than the drive/board combination
could handle.

David G

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