Why are my cd drives showing up as Multiword DMA Type 2 instead of udma?

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
What exactly is UDMA? My DVD drive is ID'd by BIOS as being in UDMA Mode 0. Windows says DMA Mode 3. Is it just Ultra DMA? I thought that was kind of a buzzword.
Either way, as long as it's using DMA, there shouldn't be performance issues; I don't think CD drives come anywhere close to 33MB/sec anyway.
 

stevewm

Senior member
Dec 6, 2001
742
1
0
Multi-Word DMA 2 is PIO Mode 4 but with DMA data transfers. It will provide up to 16.6MB/sec of bandwidth, CD=ROMs generally average around 4MB/sec, getting up to 7MB/sec on the outter edges of the disc.

ONly modern CD-ROMs or CD-RW's will run in UDMA 33 Mode.

Nonetheless you'll be just fine fine MWDMA-2. CPU usage in this mode is about the same as UDMA 33.