I have read some where that you shoulf mot use dma ennbabled on external drives as it causes problems, I have noticed that on my machien, the Primary IDS does have DMA ebabbled .while the deconmd IDS channel has PIO nabled..Is thius OK, and do the settings need ti be differet.? What is DMA Used or.
Sorry I Got In A Hurry. I noticed that DMA was enabled on my Primary IDe Channel, but PIO was enabled on the Secondary IDE Channel. I have read or heard someplace that DMA should be enabled only in extreme and special cases. Is there any truth to this, and what is exactly DMA good for? Sorry about the bad spelling before.
DMA (Direct memory access) mode is a high performance mode for transferring data to and from devices, in particular, to CD and DVD burner devices. The burner devices can function in either DMA or PIO modes. DMA mode allows the processor to transfer large pieces of data with very little software overhead - therefore requiring low CPU utilization. In this mode, high speed burning can be performed in background with other programs running. PIO mode requires CPU processing for every few bytes sent to the device, so that CPU utilization becomes very high when trying to burn at high speeds.
