How to determine DMA of hard drive in Windows 2000?

[Dougmeister]

To combat dropped frames, I want to make sure that DMA is enabled on the new Maxtor 40 Gig 5400 RPM drive I bought. I also got an ATA-100 card with it. System is a Dell P3-733, 512 MB RAM. I have 2 other HD's in the system sharing the primary and secondary IDE controllers. Maxtor tech support couldn't tell me how to check for this.

I looked in Device Manager, and the only place that I see "DMA" mentioned is under ATA/ATAPI Controllers, and then it is only for the Primary and Secondary IDE Channels. The Maxtor drive shows up under "Disk Drives", with no "Advanced" tab (where the DMA stuff usually shows up), and no DMA stuff anywhere. The ATA-100 shows up under SCSI devices.

Can anyone tell me how to ensure that DMA is on, and if not, how to turn it on?

[ktnwin]

I could not find UDMA settings for hard disks in Win2K either. I believe that if your BIOS has been setup to use UDMA with the hard disk, Win2K will automatically use UDMA.

One good way to tell is to run some benchmark software on hard disk sequential thruput.
(My StudioDV software has that measurement capability to ensure that the hard disk is capable for DV capture).

[kinneera]

The DMA settings for hard drives are *normally* in the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" entry under the primary and/or secondary IDE channel settings (I can see and change mine there, under the advanced tab). If you can't see it, it may mean your motherboard, hard drive, or controller card may not be properly recognized by Win2K. In this case, I would say the controller card installation is the first thing to check.

[RaleighNC]

the only thing i can find is for udma/66. search this site for more info: http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/axcel216/

[RaleighNC]

here's more: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q260/2/33.asp

[kinneera]

In regards to that last link - that update was included in SP2 for Win2K.

[Dougmeister]

Forgive the ignorance here, but what exactly does ATA-66 vs ATA-100 mean when it comes to talking about Direct Memory Access? I thought that DMA was independent of that. And the "100" means faster throughput, right?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Dougmeister on 2001-10-11 09:14:02 ]</font>

[gNOMEintheRedHat]

Correct.

ATA-66 and ATA-100 and soon ATA-133 are the BURST transfer speeds of the interface.

no drives available can sustain even 66MB/sec throughput, it refers to the MAX for the Master and slave together (raid) amd the MAX for cash transfers.