RAID and DMA

Just because you don't have check boxes for DMA doesn't mean the controller isn't using it. I'm sure it is. Raid controllers like this usually don't have a check box to select DMA as they do this by default. In fact, I believe most of the IDE raid controllers probably require a drive to support DMA in order for it to work on the controller. Only really old harddrives don't support it. So, you don't have to worry about any check boxes for DMA mode as the driver will do this automatically.


Anyway, you should probably connect your DVD-rom drive to the regular IDE channels on your motherboard and only connect your harddrives to the raid controller. Some raid controllers only allow harddrives connected to them and don't support ATAPI devices, like DVD-rom, Cdrom, CDRW, ls-120, or zip drives to be connected to them at all. I think the highpoint controllers may have allowed this with earlier bios and driver revisions, but I believe that even on the highpoint controllers ATAPI device support was removed with the latest drivers.

When you flash the firmware Update for your plextor just how do you go about doing that? Do you do it from windows or do you boot to a floppy or to Ms-dos command prompt mode? If your booting to Dos mode or only to a command prompt under win9x then it will be different and DMA mode may indeed be off at that time. When you boot to Dos mode your accessing the drives and controller through bios calls. When windows loads and loads the 32bit drivers for your chipset and controllers all disk access then goes through the device drivers and this is what the listings in device manager apply to.


As for the burnproof, I don't really know much about that, but I would think that it would either be controlled by a utility included with your drive or perhaps more likely by the CD burning software your using. It may even be that the burning software has to support it. Anyway, I don't think the IDE controller really has anything to do with that.


Also you might try looking at the IDE channels listed under Ide ATA/ATAPI controllers in device manager. On my system this is where these settings are listed at and not where the disk drives are listed. Of course I'm on win2k. So, that may make a difference. Also, I'm using the 860 chipset which is likely very different from 850. Anyway, I can access these settings listed under the controller channels, but they were already set correctly by default when I installed the chipset drivers. I suspect that yours are probably already configured correctly too. Nowadays usually the drivers are smart enough to enable these settings by default as long as your drives support them.