On Wednesday 01 May 2002 17:55, babu walad wrote:
After a very quick andefortless install of 8.0 I did a quick check on my hard drives and Suse tells me my Seagate Barraccuda has DMA off while my Maxtor has DMA on.
It cautions that turing DMA on may cause loss of data and since I have Suse installed on my Seagate I am cautous about turning it on.
I am wondering as to:
1. Why does the Seagate have DMA off and Maxtor on? I did not specify anything special about either of these when I first installed.
2. What effect other than performance will DMA on have?
3. Is it safe to turn it on for Seagate and what is the best way to do so?
Thanks,
Babu
Babu, Are both of these drives on the same channel, same line? Or is one on IDE channel 0 while the other is on channel 1? Do you have ATA100 cable on both (80 strands) or do you have 40 on one & 80 on the other? Are both drives ATA100 or even ATA66 type? If they are on different channels, with all else being equal, then this may be the way SuSE is setup to install them as I noticed my main drive had dma activated (channel 0) and the 2 cd drives did not (channel 1). If all the other requirements are not met, than that may be the cause. If the Seagate is not capable of dma, I don't think SuSE will let you turn it on. Mine didn't let me using hdparm from a shell on my cds. That is the biggest benefit of DMA, the performance gain. DMA=Direct Memory Access Someone correct me if I am mistaken about this, but I believe you can try to turn on DMA to the Seagate without doing harm, your system will just misbehave badly if it is not capable to doing DMA. Patrick -- --- KMail v1.4 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 Magic Page Products -- Amiga-SuSE-PC Sales & Service URL: http://home.sprintmail.com/~tracerb