DMA

Problems enabling DMA on IDE drives

Are you experiencing jerky DivX;-) movies or does your mp3s click and
pop on your new fancy Pentium IV 3Ghz+?

Then the reason is probably that XP has set your IDE drives into PIO
mode instead of DMA! Remedy? Enter the device manager by right clicking
“my computer” and choosing “properties” and then “hardware”.

Double click on the “IDE primary drive” and then “advanced settings”.
There you can see the current setting for the master and the slave drives
on the primary IDE channel. There you can select transfer mode. If it is
set at “PIO only”, then select “DMA if available” instead and reboot!

If the computer persists on having only PIO after reboot even though
the hard drive is a flashing super-duper ATA133 and transfer mode set
to “DMA if available”, then you have to do the following:

Remove the primary device in the device manager and reboot! Voilà, now
the harddrive should be running in DMA mode.

Repeat on the secondary IDE channel if necessary.