To DMA set or not as the case maybe?

[Piccolo22]

Hi All

I now have the Gigabyte GA8-IEXP board based on the Intel 845E chipset.

I was checking through various settings and was reminded about DMA settings for connected drives. I run Windows98se and on my old mainboard an Aopen AX63Pro there was the option to set DMA.

However, I now see that with this board the setting is not even there - never thought to look before. Is it because this board relies on the Intel IAA for speeding up disk access etc I have run HDD speed tests and they are all "good" for things like video editing that need good read/write speeds.

But the fact that DMA is not even shown greyed out is puzzling.

Any ideas on this one?

[bassman]

That is quite odd...anyway, the mb should have a setting to enable/disable DMA - maybe a BIOS update will provide you that feature...
By the way, after the PC POSTs and immediatly before it starts booting the OS, in the table that appears on screen wich allows you to see IDE devices (among other things), can you see the IDE devices' modes?

[Piccolo22]

Hi Bassman

I am using the most recent BIOS, even took it back to the previous one as a test.

During post the drives are ID,d but no other details. When the RAID/ATA posts my bigger drive is ID'ed as UDMA5 all this telling me is that it is a 100z drive. Looking via the Intel AA the main drive on IDE 1 is UDMA4 i.e. a 66MHz drive.

But as for the DMA status, a mystery?