DMA enabled?

[edjam]

Hi, I have two hard drives. One IBM 40GB 60GXP and another IBM 45GB 75GXP. Should i have DMA enabled on them?

 

[bacillus]

yes, enable DMA for both of them!

 

[edjam]

What does it do then?

 

[Scouzer]

Increases performance by quite a bit.

 

[Shooters]

DMA stands for direct memory access. As the name implies, it simply means that your hard drive can communicate directly with your RAM without having to go through the cpu thus increasing performance by a significant amount. You can actually test this in HDTach. Run the benchmark without DMA and then with DMA. You'll find that the cpu utilization will decrease a pretty good amount when going from the former to the latter configuration.

 

[edjam]

Uhm, for my 75GXP, tehre is no DMA option,is this because its on a Promise controller card?

 

[Noriaki]

Promise Card will automatically set it to DMA mode if it's a hard drive.

And you definately want DMA, it's faster transfer rates and lower CPU utilization.