I was hoping someone could help me out, I have just built a new computer, I have a 320gb sata HDD and 2x pioneer sata dvd burners. When I insert a cd r or dvd data disk and attemp to copy the contents to my HDD, it feels very slow. Im running vista x64 ultimate. When copying I click on details and it shows the speed as 2.3mb. To me thats slow isnt it for a dvd drive? or is that normal copying speeds? Thanks
It may not be the same for SATA drives (I can't remember how it works off the top of my head atm) but have a look at this guide and check if your drives are in DMA mode.. http://my.afterdawn.com/alkohol/blog_entry.cfm/231/dmaissues If you see nothing relating to DMA when you get to hardware manager, ignore the guide and get back to me.
woops just hit post reply before I typed anything - sorry! Just wanted to thank you for the info - saved me $100 sending the 'puter to the tech. My computer guy mentioned something about dma but was having trouble finding the answer, so I found it for him via you...needless to say he was very impressed! I only needed to uninstall the secondary driver though - primary was all okay! One quick question - what makes it change from DMA to PIO in the first place? This has happened inexplicably about three times now with different burners.
A Series of read errors will kick the drive down into PIO mode...six is the magic number I do believe.
