DMA? what?

[Pseo15]

whats DMA?? it stands for direct memory acess. does that mean my HDD goes straight to RAM and skips talking with the CPU? How do u know if u have DMA?? and is it good?
I want to enable it in windows system manager, but dont know what will happen.
BTW I have a 10.2 GB Maxtor HDD. windows 98 128 MB PC 100 RAM and celeron 400

[AuraEdge]

DMA should cause no problems if you arent overclocking. To have it on u must (both)
a) have DMA on the device you wish to use DMA on in the BIOS
b) have DMA on in windows device manager

This will nearly double bandwidth, making it go from 18.8 MB/s to 33 MB/s or something to that effect. (double for ATA-66 drives and ports)