Wuts Dma?

[Apostle 83]

Hey, I enabled dma on my hdd, and lemme tell ya, it did something good!

Now I wanna know what in tarnation it is?
Can anyone tell me at least what the acronym stands for?

[grandslammer]

If I'm not mistaken it's direct memory access. So your hardware can access your ram without going through "channels"

So, as you can see, this would "accelerate" a lot of processes.

Mike P.

[Pantion]

It is Direct Memory Access and it enable the device to bypass the long trip from the device to the cpu and then to memory.

It help a lot on some devices, but causes problems on others so just be carefull when you enable it.

[AuraEdge]

DMA usually about doubles your max burst rate from the HDD.
DMA usually doesnt cause any troubles EXCEPT when you are overclocked to a bus speed thats not 33Mhz for the PCI bus
It usually works fine w/ dma up to about 35-36 Mhz, any higher and it may halt the system when booting, ect.

This is expecially a problem with maxtors (personal experience)