DMA or U-DMA....How to tell???

ceraph

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Aug 4, 2000
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DMA and UDMA are drastically different things.

DMA includes the Quantum spec up to ATA/33. If your motherboard is based on the BX or earlier chipset, this is your highest possible throughput. If your MB is any earlier, it probably only supports PIO modes. Generally, DMA or ATA/33 can be referred to as DMA-2.

UDMA involves the Quantum and unified spec up to ATA/100. UDMA can be referred to as UDMA-4 (ATA/66) or UDMA-5 (ATA/100). The quickest way to see if your motherboard's onboard controller supports these modes is to look at your BIOS information screen as your computer is booting. For the physical disks, you should see two fields, the size and the mode. (For recent BIOS's anyway). If you actually have an ATA/100 disk, you will see the size of the disk, followed by UDMA 5.

If you don't have any ATA/100 or ATA/66 disks, and want to know if your motherboard supports UDMA 4 or 5, the best way would probably just be to go to the manufacturer's website and look up your model. If you don't know your model, you can look inside your case. The make and model are generally located in either the center of the board, or in one of the visible corners.

If you want more information on this, someone else asked a question about this earlier and I posted more info on it here

 

ceraph

Member
Aug 4, 2000
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Can I give you the engineer's reasoning .. probably not.

The qualifier of UDMA spec (2, 4, 5) is supposedly the multiplier for the clock rate of the data bus. Though, I don't think it's a constant clock rate that it's multiplying -- otherwise UDMA 5 would be somewhere near ATA/88 =).

Maybe someone else can explain, dunno. Sorry.
 
Mar 9, 2001
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No need to say "I'm sorry."

Someone, somewhere, knows the answer. And, it's not at all important. Just a curiosity thing.