flak monkey
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| posted on 2/6/06 at 06:14 AM |
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DVD writer advice... (DMA guide)
Thought I would pass on this bit of knowledge to the masses, just incase you are having the same problems as me with your DVD writer.
My DVD writer was running very slowly, even if it was claiming to be running at 12x, it was still taking 30mins to write a disc. And about 50% of the
time it was generating coasters rather than DVDs.
Last night I decided to investigate and have now resolved the issue. And having a look on google shows that its not an uncommon problem so I thought I
would pass this on...
If your writer is running a lot slower than it should, or keep scrapping discs do the following:
1. Go to device manager (right click on My Computer>properties>hardware>device manager)
2. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers branch. Right click on the IDE channel on which your drive is connected. Click the advanced settings tab, and
check that the transfer mode is set to DMA if available for ALL of the IDE channels and devices (you will probably find your DVD writer has set itself
to PIO Only). Once thats done click ok. If prompted to restart your computer click NO, theres more to do yet.
3. Now Right click again on each of the IDE channels inturn, go to the driver tab, and click Uninstall. You will be prompted, click OK. (Dont worry,
the IDE drivers are part of Windoze and will automatically be reinstalled when you reboot). Do this for all IDE channels, then reboot.
4. Windows will reinstall the IDE channel drivers once it has loaded and will prompt you to restart again. Do so.
5. Now try burning a disc. If its faster and doesnt generate lots of coasters the activation of DMA was a success! If not, you need to go back to
Device Manager, and uninstall the drivers for your CD/DVD-ROM drives, and restart again (they will automatically be reinstalled).
DMA (Direct Memory Access) allows faster tranfer rates between drives and memory, essentially keeping the processor out of the loop. If this was your
problem, you will notice an increase in both the Read and Write capability of your drive. I can now write DVDs in 5 mins and 'shrink' them
in 30.
It seems that if you have swapped DVD writers and not reinstalled Windows, DMA gets turned off for some reason. The above will fix it and put your
performance up where it should be.
Let me know if this has been useful!
David
Sera
http://www.motosera.com
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RoadkillUK
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| posted on 2/6/06 at 09:26 AM |
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I have just done this with my SATA HDD (well a few days ago), 250 gig of storage, PC would only read at 16meg/s. After much messing about I finally
found the same thing as flak monkey, my HDD was running in PIO mode. After changing the settings (but not removing the IDE drivers) my HDD now runs 5
times faster 
Roadkill - Lee
www.bradford7.co.uk
Latest Picture (14 Sept 2014)
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