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| ULTRA DMA/33 |
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| What is Ultra DMA ? |
Ultra DMA/33 is a new interface protocol that
delivers data transfer rates up to 33MB/s, which is twice as fast as the 16MB/s which was
attainable on PIO Mode 4 compatible E-IDE drives. Without going to much into technical
details it suffices to say that Ultra DMA/33 can reach this high speed by using both sides
of a clocksignal (rising and falling), thus doubling the effective transferrate. Both
harddisk drives as well as IDE interfaces will have to support this standard in order to
take advantage of this speed. Look for harddisks compliant with the Ultra ATA standard. |
| Can my mainboard
support it ? |
Ultra DMA/33 requires the support on the hardware
level, which means the IDE interface should support this standard, which in most cases
means the chipset should support this standard. UDMA support is included on all mainboards
using the following chipsets: Intel TX/LX/EX/BX chipsets, SiS5598/82 chipset, VIA VP3 and
MVP3 chipsets. |
| How do I use it ? |
Ultra DMA/33 is automatically detected by the
Chaintech mainboards that support this standard. If your harddisk is Ultra DMA/33
compliant (Ultra ATA or ATA-4) and you are not sure whether the Ultra DMA/33 mode is being
used or not, go into the BIOS setup`s `Integrated Peripherals` section and make sure the
UDMA (means Ultra DMA/33) for the IDE port on which your drive is used, has been enabled.
During system startup you will also see this mode UDMA2 mentioned in the system overview.
(actually, Ultra DMA/33 has three modes, mode 0, 1, 2 of which mode 2 is the fastest) |
| How`s the
performance ? |
According to some sources, Ultra ATA drives using
the Ultra DMA protocol will be able to surpass wide SCSI drives performance at half the
price. However, the average user might not always notice a huge improvement in performance
when switching from a `normal` E-IDE drive to an Ultra DMA drive. This is because of the
fact that even though it is possible to transport the data at a rate of 33MB/s from the
harddisk to the PC, most popular harddisks currently on the market can only read data from
their disks at a rate of 10MB/s ! Only in a heavy multi-tasking environment, where large
blocks of data are constantly swapped from and to the harddisk, the great advantage of
this high speed will become apparent. So don`t expect any huge benchmark gains when
testing your newly bought Ultra ATA harddisk with your favorite testprogram (unless the
testprogram takes multi-tasking performance into account). |
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