DMA Settings for HD

[Bud]

When Captureing or Converting large files, should the DMA for the HD be Enabled or not? I have seen pros and cons on this as far a basic data transfers but nothing on the Video side. Running WIN2000Pro on a AMD 1.7 GH system with 120 GB HD (7200RPM) (Western Digital) Thanks in Advance

Bud

[vivisimonvi]

DMA enabled is supposed to give better performance for capturing. I put in a new Western Digital Harddrive but I can't seem to enable DMA (whenever I restart it ends up saying it's disabled). The new Harddrive is DMA compatible but I don't know why it's not working. I would appreciate some insight to why this is or how to get it to work.

[JHebert]

You definitely want DMA enabled for maximum hard drive performance.
If you cannot enable DMA on your drive one possible cause could be that you have a CD or DVD drive on the same IDE channel as the hard drive. You should keep hard drives on seperate channel from CD or DVD drives for best performance.
Check your IDE cables and be sure to use a 80 conductor cable for ATA66 and ATA100 hard drives.
Also make sure you have updated drivers especially if you have a Via chipset based motherboard.

[LavaJockey]

I tried the BIOS update. That was supposed to work, but did not. I tried
the Windows Service Pack 2. That worked, I think, but it introduced some
other problem which caused me to drop frames on the ATA/100 disk, as well as
another ATA/33 disk, which had no problems previously. I didn't bother to
diagnose this any further. I finally tried the Western Digital utility and
changed my ATA/100 drive to an ATA/66 drive, and that worked. Thanks to
everyone for the help!

[LavaJockey]

That last message was meant for a different discussion. I have no idea why it was put here.