What the devil are PIO modes???

[troubledshooter]

In trying to get my pair of EIDE CD drives (plexwriter 12x10x32, toshiba 12x DVD) to run via DMA to speed up burnign (15 min to burn with a 12x burner? SOMETHING is wrong). Anyhow, I have failed miserably despite a thread to this effect (in win2k). I set them to "DMA if available" in device manager, and they remain on PIO. I have tried them each at the slave and master position respectively. I read that to enable DMA you must first tell the BIOS to use PIO mode 4...what is this? This is the first I have heard of PIO modes....My HD runs perfectly at Ultra DMA when I set it to DMA if avail. on the default values on my Abit KT7. Any ideas?

as always, anthing helps!

thanks again guys

______________________
Abit KT7
TB 750 @ ???
7200 RPM 20gb WD HD
eVGA geforce2 MX
CD drives as above
256 pc133 RAM

 

[troubledshooter]

No one cares to venture a guess on this one eh?

 

[Warrenton]

Make sure DMA is enabled in the BIOS for that channel.

If it is, then try each drive by itself as master.

 

[AndyHui]

PIO, or Programmed IO modes, are what IDE devices run if they can't handle UDMA. Just the same as UDMA, has different speeds. If your drive can't handle UDMA, then most likely it will default to PIO mode 4, which was the fastest (F-ATA16).

Make sure you have the latest IDE drivers....

Some CDRW/CDROM drives don't like DMA mode....especially CDRWs. I don't know why.....some make coasters if you set that.

 

[troubledshooter]

I have read nothing but people reporting that specifically the Plextor 12x10x32A DOES run in DMA mode, but mine seems to be failing here. I have DMA in BIOS set to "auto" since there is no plain old "enable." Can't really run each drive on its own chain since I need the other for my HD. Where could I get newer IDE drivers? I know the toshiba web site says the tosh's dont need any special ones, and the microsoft updates secion of microsoft.com has nothing new for me (win2k just dled all those yesterday).

Thanks again