Often I hear my friends complaining about slow hard drives. Yesterday one of my classmates asked me how to boost the performance of his new harddrive. I told him about a simple and very easy tweak, that would significantly increase the performance of his hard drive.
Win9x sets DMA to OFF by default. You have to switch it on. In theory, enabling DMA increases UDMA Hard Disk access to 33.3 MB/sec. In practice, speed will increase substantially from the old standard of 16MB/sec. Furthermore, DMA uses only 25% of CPU resources compared to 40% normally. Nearly all 5400rpm/7200rpm, and some lower speed, drives, support DMA.
Now I'll tell you about it. Ready ?
Right-click on "my computer". Now click on "properties". Now search for "devide manager" and click properties of your hard drive. It should have an option called "DMA". By enabling this, your hard drive should show an increase in performance. Also, this method can increase the transfer rate of your CD/DVD-ROM or CD/DVD-Writer, possibly eliminating those under buffer run errors.
Again, an easy tweak which could improve you hard drive's performance
