KT7 and window's DMA setting

[cavingjan]

I have a KT7Raid board with a 20 Gig WD ATA66 drive installed on it. If I go into the HighPoint's BIOS, it shows it as UDMA mode 4. In windows, I do not have the option to enable DMA like I do with my DVD, CDRW, and zip. Is this normal or do I have something funky going on?

 

[gimps]

Are you using an 80-wire cable? Did you install all of Abit's drivers to allow DMA?
Those are a couple things to check.

 

[cavingjan]

Ok. So I should have the DMA checkbox in windows. I have 80 pin connectors on all my drives. I will go back and check the drivers.

 

[IceBlue]

Mine does the same thing. I think that the HPT controller (IDE 1 and 2) recognizes the ATA66, and that's all that's needed. No DMA check box appears in Win98 for me. I think the check box is required if the drive is connected to IDE 3 or 4 only (using VIA ide controller).

Try running a harddrive benchmarking program (Sisoft Sandra) and see what the drive's read/write bandwidth is. Mine read ~40 MB/s.

Since that was greater than ATA33 (33MB/s), I am convinced that the drive is correctly running in ATA66 mode.

Feel free to share differing experiences/errors in logic/opinions.
(it's Election Day after all!)

Pay it Forward,
ICEBlue

 

[DaddyG]

ATA66 does not have a PIO mode, so DMA mode is the only option.

 

[cavingjan]

Thanks a bunch. I'll take that as my system is not doing anything unusual. Now if only I could get Unreal to run better with this Radeon...30 seconds for precaching is not acceptable.