HD Question

[Tameanaka]

K this may be dumb, but humor me. I was setting up my software for my video card and in the process I got a message about the TV. It said that the quality would be degraded because DMA mode is not enabled for my HD. Am I supposed to enable this in bios somewhere? I have a seagate SATA II drive. what is dma anyway? can i even enable with a sata HD?

[Voltes-5]

Direct Memory Access, here ya go.

 

http://www.real-knowledge.com/dma.htm

[uneedav8]

I have yet to see a DMA setting for a SATA drive in the device manager. You could go into the BIOS and leave it on auto detect for the hard drive......there is usually dma and pio mode. But this is the way you enable it on ATAPI devices like ata hard drives and cd-roms......good luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. To enable DMA mode using the Device Manager

 

 

 

 

2.Open Device Manager.

 

 

 

3. Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to display the list of controllers and channels.

 

 

 

 

4. Right-click the icon for the channel to which the device is connected, select Properties, and then click the Advanced Settings tab.

 

 

 

 

In the Current Transfer Mode drop-down box, select DMA if Available if the current setting is "PIO Only."

If the drop-down box already shows "DMA if Available" but the current transfer mode is PIO, then the user must toggle the settings. That is:

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Change the selection from "DMA if available" to PIO only, and click OK.

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Then repeat the steps above to change the selection to DMA if Available.

[Tameanaka]

yeah dma mode isn't available for the drive. besides enabling dma is slower than sata 2 right? I don't know why the media ceneter software says it should be enabled for higher quality video.

[Voltes-5]

He he he, realised that after I poste response uneedav8, LOL. So that setting on the bios, is it only for IDE or does that apply to SATA or SATA II also?

[ztech1]

It depends on the IDE drivers you are using. The Windows drivers seem to treat the SATA bus just like the PATA bus and give the PIO/DMA pulldown box option. The NV SW IDE drivers only allow a transfer rate adjustment and a NCQ toggle if the drive supports it.

 

BTW, use the NV SW IDE drivers (NF4 chipset only). They made a big difference speed wise in my system over the Windows installed drivers.

[Tameanaka]

I am using the NV IDE drivers indeed.

[Voltes-5]

So, all that needs to be done is update the driver through device manager then with NV IDE. I dont think I installed that in the first process of installing the OS.