dma question

[brett1]

I have a toshiba 16x dvd rom drive and a plextor 16/10/40 burner and was wondering if these drives should be able to transfer any faster than the following modes my bios reports them as:

dvdrom shows ata 33
burner shows PIO 4

right now I have dvd as secondary master and burner as secondary slave. Does anyone know if these can go in a higher transfer mode?

Oh yea, forgot to mention that I have them hooked up with one of those high speed ribbon cables for 66/100 stuff

 

[littletemple]

what os are you running? You did try to set them as DMA under device manager right? If that doesn't work, uninstall the secondary ide channel and reinstall it, then set it to dma. I had the same problem with my hard drive under w2k. I unistalled and then rebooted, it detected new hardware, installed it, rebooted, changed setting to dma in device manager, rebooted, checked, and it was dma mode.

 

[brett1]

I'm running winxp on an epox 8k7a

do you think my dvd drive could run ata 66 instead of 33?
I guess I'll go ahead and try messing with the burner to see if it'll connect in dma mode

 

[littletemple]

i heard somewhere that most cd-rom devices can only connect at ata-33. Mine is set as ultra dma mode 2 which i think is ata-33 under xp. Try reinstalling and installing it again, i believe it will work if you do that.

 

[brett1]

Hmm, I just read the toshiba site and it says that the max for this dvd drive is ata 33, which it is connecting at so that's all fine and good. However, the plextor drive is not connecting at what it should be, according to their site. I unplugged it, booted up, powered down, plugged it back in and nothing changed. Now I guess i'll try switching it to the master and see what happens

 

[brett1]

Nope, I've tried switching the cable, switching the drive to master, etc but I can't get it into dma mode. Could this be a motherboard problem?

 

[brett1]

stupid windows reports it as dma mode 2, which is false because my bios says it's PIO 4

 

[Pederv]

PIO Mode4 or DMA33 will depend on your motherboard/bios.
I've had the same board see the same CDROM as both PIO Mode4 and DMA33, the only difference was the version of bios I used.
If you look at the specs for your drive you'll notice that the burst rate is 16.6 MB/s for either PIO Mode4 or DMA33.

 

[dbal]

Your dvd drive says ATA33 and it's absolutely right since this is its spec. (don't mess with the actual tranfer rate-it's a different story). But with the plextor reporting PIO mode 4 is great mistake since it should report ATA33 as well (I always refer to the bios ok?) Try different master/slave combinations to achieve that since it might hog your writer's performance. As for the DMA story, from my experience, it's totally a motherboard-IDE controller issue......Try the uninstall of the controller carefully-it might help

 

[brett1]

Hmm, I tried putting the burner as both the master and slave and even by itself on the secondary ide port for the mobo (epox 8k7a)

I even flashed the latest firmware for it....and my bios is the latest revision....could this be a problem with my mobo?

 

[Pederv]

My Plextor 12/10/32 also comes up as PIO Mode4 on my 8K7A+ and I don't have any problems with it.

EDIT: In the BIOS, that is. In Win2K it comes up as DMA33.