Uncached Speed?

[ChingChang]

Drive C has an uncached speed of 3.12 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU and clock speed as this one have a speed of 13.65 MB/s.

My friend did a test and it said this about his drive.


His system specs are:
Pentium 4 2.66ghz
GeForce FX 5600XT 256 mb
512mb DDR RAM (I think it is pc3200)
200gb 7200rpm HDD
P4C800 mobo
Windows XP Home

He got the comp like a month ago.
Any ideas?

 

[ChingChang]

Read some people with the same problem had to enable DMA (Direct Memory Access I think it's called?). Should this be done if the OS is Win XP Home? and how would I do this if it can?

 

[axdx]

Originally posted by ChingChang
Read some people with the same problem had to enable DMA (Direct Memory Access I think it's called?). Should this be done if the OS is Win XP Home? and how would I do this if it can?

Go to device manager, select "IDE .... controllers", select either primary or secondary IDE channel (harddisks usually on primary, CD-roms on secondary), choose "properties" -> "Advanced settings" -> "Transfer mode: DMA if available"

 

[ChingChang]

Alright, thanks. But DMA makes it so the hard drive gets direct memory access and doesn't have to go through the cpu first? Is that a smart thing to do? or does having it go through the CPU increase stability or something? I just don't understand what the advantage of having it disabled does.

Thanks

 

[Snugglebear]

If you enable DMA on a device that doesn't properly support it, be it bad design, buggy firmware, or just plain old, the system can crash. MS disables DMA by default on many devices to keep that from happening.

 

[Ice Czar]

In addition independent device timing (master slave sharing)
will default a DMA capable device to PIO if there is a PIO only (or degraded to PIO) device on the same channel