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Plextor 16x Questions?

S

SSERAB

Member
<P>I just received a retail box Plexwriter 16x burner from Dell and no where on the box does it say specifically &quot;BURNPROOF&quot;.&amp;nbsp; The Plextor website says that the drive uses burn proof technology but the box doesn't.&amp;nbsp; Anyone know for sure?<BR><BR>Also, I've seen the firmware upgrades on the Plextor site-- do you have to upgrade them all or can you just update to the latest firmware version.&amp;nbsp; I don't want to miss out on any performance.<BR><BR>Thanks.</P>
 
Burnproof be there.

Also, put a jumper on the pins in back labeled 'test'. That's the only way to enable DMA.
 
Now that I think about it, I believe it is labeled &quot;reserved&quot;, not test. Those pins have to be jumped to enable DMA transfers. (don't know why the drives aren't shipped that way)

 
ok now you've got me feeling dumb--what is a DMA transfer, sorry if it's a stupid question. Is it a transfer from the hard drive to the burner?
 
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. This is the standard to connect IDE devices nowadays. If your drives don't run in DMA mode, they're probably running in PIO mode.

That's a leftover from years back, and basicly means the CPU has to handle every memory access between the drives and the memory itself, thereby slowing down your computer considerably.

With DMA, your drives can access memory or the PCI bus without &quot;bothering&quot; the CPU, so everything is sped up. If you can, DO enable DMA mode for everything you have on modern hardware, since it's SO much better. I noticed WinME and Win2K disable the DMA mode by default on the secundary IDE controller, so that's something you might want to check out.

A quick example to conclude. My Maxtor VL40 pulls ~20Mb/sec sustained with the standard linux hdparm test with dma mode explicitly enabled. Running in PIO mode results in ~3Mb/sec...
 
bozo1,

I'm really interested in that special jumper thingy to enable DMA mode. Is this a documented feature, or something you found out yourself ? You wouldn't happen to have some linkage for it, now would you ? 🙂
 
It's an undocumented feature. Do a search here and you'll find it discussed in numerous threads. It was documented somewhere at one point - either Plextor's Europe site or it may have been documented in one of the European manuels - I don't quite remember.

 
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