Question about DMA and Promise ATA100 card..........

[AndyWelch]

In the bios message for the ATA promise card, it says that my drive is on DMA 5 (ATA 100)
But in windows, the DMA box is not there and there are other boxes enabled that I have not seen in use with a hard drive before.
Not sure if there is a problem or not, I ran Sisoft Sandra on it, and it was underperforming in comparison (my harddrive is the IBM Desktar GXP 30.7GB 7200rpm etc..)
According to forums this is one of the fastest UDMA hard drives around.
Do I need to play around with windows to get it to recognise DMA, or am I worrying about nothing?!
My motherboard is the Abit KT7 (without raid)

 

[BlueTDimly]

What version of Windows? I believe some earlier versions don't support UDMA 100.

 

[AndyWelch]

win98se

Ive just been reading the KT7faq page, it seems there are some problems associated with the IBM hard drive and the onboard RAID controller. Not sure if this applies for my ATA100 pci card, as its not raid
Basically, should I have a DMA box under the hard drive properties?

 

[BlueTDimly]

Your solution (at promise's site)

Checked out Promise's site, and found the solution.

"The "DMA checkbox" that you?re referring to will not appear for any HDD connected to the Ultra100. Since the card?s sole purpose in life is to provide you?re computer with an ATA/100 interface, the feature is automatically, and always, enabled. As long as the Ultra100 BIOS detects the HDD as "Mode 5", the ATA/100 timing will be used. You can check this by running a benchmark program on the HDD. We recommend using the CoreTest utility that you can download from ftp://ftp.promise.com/Misc/CT3.EXE. NOTE: You should run CoreTest from a true DOS environment. To do this, reboot your computer using a boot disk. Now you can switch to the HDD and run CoreTest. "

BlueT

 

[Hexadecimal]

I have the same setup verbatim. I do not have an option for dma but I am more than confident that it's turned on.