UDMA settings

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GT-T88urbo
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Post by GT-T88urbo » 24 Jan 2009, 9:52 pm

My current setup consists of 2 hard drives and 2 dvd burners.
Now, i have had problems with my DMA settings before and i've managed to fix all of that, one thing i cant fix are the DMA settings for my dvd-roms. My primarys' running on UDMA 5 and my secondary is running on UDMA 4. What I dont get is, the one running on 5 is an older one and the one running on 4 is a newer one.

Any suggestions?.. :s

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Neo
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Post by Neo » 24 Jan 2009, 10:24 pm

Well noone tinkers with DMA settings these days coz those devices and OS manage these automatically.
If one of your drive is DMA 4 then the firmware is telling the O/s that the drive goes well with this DMA setting.

Two options.
Check bios if it has PNP OS enabled.
Check the cable used, there are different kinds of PATA cable, 80 conductor and 40 conductor.

IF its SATA then the latter doesnt apply.

And what ever you might end up doing I can promise you that it isnt going to make any visible difference in performance.

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Post by GT-T88urbo » 25 Jan 2009, 6:22 pm

The thing is due to power fluctuations my pc often restarts in the middle of me doing something. And accordingly the OS drops my DMA from lets say 5 to a 4 and so on and eventually on 'PIO only'. Which let me tell you is pretty close to being as slow as a pentium 1. My start-up+boot takes upto 5 min.

After i figured out how to reset all of it back to its original setting, which is UDMA 5. Everythings come back to normal, startup+boot takes about 40secs, no more scratchy noises while i listen to music, etc.
But what i cant figure out is why my DVD burner, which i recently bought, that should be on a 5 is currently on 4. Thats my main issue. I've tried everything i could find on the internet, but hasnt helped.

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Post by mikeh » 30 Jan 2009, 10:23 pm

"power fluctuations" - is it internal or the power source?
If the latter, get a small UPS

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Neo
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Post by Neo » 30 Jan 2009, 11:10 pm

power fluctuation in uae?
Okay if your pc is restarting and sometimes fail to restart it cud be smps issue. With the new hardware ur smps may not be supplying enuff power.

Try upgrading ur power supply
Maybe its gone bad
Also the performance might suffer due to the device trying to work in compatibility mode?
If u dnt want spend money get an smps from ur friend. Atleat 400w is recomended



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