DMA ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scientific
  • Start date Start date
S

Scientific

Hello all,

I have an AMD Athlon 64 CPU and SATA motherboard with a separate PCI IDE
controller card installed. My BIOS doesn't recognize the controller card
(Ultra ATA 133 PCI) in the PCI slot, so I can't tell whether the drives (both
Seagate 750 GB)connected to the controller card are using DMA mode or not.

Also, Windows does not provide much info on those drives either. Does
anyone know how to determine if DMA is on/off on those drives?

-S
 
Scientific said:
Hello all,

I have an AMD Athlon 64 CPU and SATA motherboard with a separate PCI IDE
controller card installed. My BIOS doesn't recognize the controller card
(Ultra ATA 133 PCI) in the PCI slot, so I can't tell whether the drives
(both
Seagate 750 GB)connected to the controller card are using DMA mode or not.

Also, Windows does not provide much info on those drives either. Does
anyone know how to determine if DMA is on/off on those drives?

-S
Click to expand...

Have you installed the PCI IDE controller card drivers?
 
Scientific said:
Hello all,

I have an AMD Athlon 64 CPU and SATA motherboard with a separate PCI IDE
controller card installed. My BIOS doesn't recognize the controller card
(Ultra ATA 133 PCI) in the PCI slot, so I can't tell whether the drives (both
Seagate 750 GB)connected to the controller card are using DMA mode or not.

Also, Windows does not provide much info on those drives either. Does
anyone know how to determine if DMA is on/off on those drives?

-S
Click to expand...

They use a pseudo-SCSI layer, for controllers other than the one
provided by the chipset. And that is why the information is hidden.
All the OS knows, is it sends a SCSI CDB to the driver, and the
driver converts the command into things it knows how to do on
the PCI chip.

The best way to tell if DMA is operating, is to benchmark the drives.
If you see 70MB/sec near the beginning of the disk, and 40MB/sec
near the end of the disk, that would be about right for media
(head to platter) limited transfers. If the card was really
in PIO mode, then you'd see a flat line at about 4MB/sec or
so. The PCI bus can manage 110-120MB/sec, so you would not
expect more than that (like if examining burst performance).

http://www.hdtune.com
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Paul
 
Jerry,

Yep, installed the PCI IDE drivers but there's no configuration or other
software per se that allows one to manage the controller card. Really sucks
I would say.

-S
 
Paul,

Guess I'll try the benchmark test and see what it tells me. Will post back
with results tomorrow. Time for bed right now though :-)

-S
 
That bios is only for the motherboard. My PCI card has it's own BIOS which
shows after the motherboards just after turning the computer on. Since yours
probably doesn't support hardware RAID control you might not have any PCI
card BIOS options.
 
All posters,

I downloaded HDTune as suggested by JS and ran the HD test on my primary
drive. Since both HD's are the same I only needed to run it on one drive.
Sure enough, HDTune reported my primary drive is using UDMA Mode 5 which I
guess translates into Ultra DMA Mode 5. Following are the benchmarks HDTune
reported:

Transfer Rate:
Minimum = 13.4MB/Sec
Maximum = 78.1MB/Sec
Average = 63.8MB/Sec

Access Time: 16.3ms
Burst Rate: 82.5MB/Sec

I figure the access time for a large capacity drive of this size might range
somewhere between 12 and 16ms. As for the Min, Max and Avg numbers I will
assume those are also normal for the drive type. At any rate I am now
satisfied the drives are utilizing Direct Memory Access.

Thank you to all posters of this thread. I am never dissastified with the
answers I recieve here. All of you ROCK big time and I am very grateful for
your input, and I always leave here a little smarter than when I came.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU again :-)

-S
 
You're welcome.

JS

Scientific said:
All posters,

I downloaded HDTune as suggested by JS and ran the HD test on my primary
drive. Since both HD's are the same I only needed to run it on one drive.
Sure enough, HDTune reported my primary drive is using UDMA Mode 5 which I
guess translates into Ultra DMA Mode 5. Following are the benchmarks
HDTune
reported:

Transfer Rate:
Minimum = 13.4MB/Sec
Maximum = 78.1MB/Sec
Average = 63.8MB/Sec

Access Time: 16.3ms
Burst Rate: 82.5MB/Sec

I figure the access time for a large capacity drive of this size might
range
somewhere between 12 and 16ms. As for the Min, Max and Avg numbers I will
assume those are also normal for the drive type. At any rate I am now
satisfied the drives are utilizing Direct Memory Access.

Thank you to all posters of this thread. I am never dissastified with the
answers I recieve here. All of you ROCK big time and I am very grateful
for
your input, and I always leave here a little smarter than when I came.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU again :-)

-S
Click to expand...
 
Paul,

After re-reading your post I must apologize for not acknowledging in my last
post the two links you provided at the end of your reply to this thread.

-S
 
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