There maybe a bios setting for enabling UDMA on the IDE channels, The slave
of the 2ndary may have it disabled
OR like you said but most of todays Opticls will use some level of DMA

"678" wrote in message
...
Hi all:

I'm wondering: if I have two optical drives connected together, can I
get them both use DMA?

Right now I have one CD-RW connected to a DVD-ROM: CD-RW as master and
DVD-ROM as slave. Under "Properties" in "Device Manager" it says current
mode of transfer for device 0 is "Ultra DMA" and for device 1 it is
"PIO", although in the transfer mode boxes both have "DMA if available".
It looks like to me only one drive -- I am guess it is the CD-RW -- is
using DMA and the other one is not, and the reason being DMA is only
available for one of the drives. Am I correct?

If not, is there a way for both of them to use DMA?

If only one of them can use DMA, then which one would benefit more from
it: CD-RW or DVD-ROM?

My OS is XP Pro and I'm using P4 2.53.

Thank you!


Alex