Enable DMA for one of the hard drives

[uhill]

I have two hard drives C and F. I designated F drive to be my dedicated drive for video editing. I want to enable DMA on the F drive. Which settings do I change: Primary IDE chanel properies or Secondary IDE chanel properties? Will this cause any issues for any other of my applications?

[THoff]

You can change the DMA setting only on a per-physical-drive basis only. If C: and F: are partitions on the same physical drive, you cannot do what you want.

Otherwise, go into Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers, select the channel that the drive is attached to, select Properties, and change the DMA setting.

BTW, I can't think of any good reason why you would NOT want to use DMA. Using PIO will cause a significant performance hit. For this reason, Windows default to using DMA if it is available.

[GeorgeK]

Enabling DMA is only allowing your computer's software to make full use of your motherboard and Hard Disk drive's full capability.

I have enabled DMA on all my drives, including my DVD/CD ROM and DVD burner. Actually the Drives run as Ultra DMA mode.

I have found this good for all appicatons, especially for copying files from DVD to HD. When burning, I am limited by the Burner's burning speed which is an 8 times, but on copying, it greatly helps.

You did not specifiy the version of Ulead Video Studio that your using, but If you have the UVS8 or UVS9 manuals (and most likely earlier versions too), you should find very clear instructions on how to set this.

A breif instruction that works for my operating system, Windows 2000;

1. Control Panel: System: Hardware tab: Device Manager.
2. Click "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
3. Double click on Primary IDE Channel: Advanced settings.
4. Be sure Current transfer mode is DMA. (Transfer mode should be DMA if available in default.)

I am not use why it is recommend to turn off "Write cache enabled", but under the Device Manages "Disk Drives" and for each of your hard Drives, on the "Disk Properties" tab, uncheck the "Write cache enabled". I have also applied this change, also.

Are you trying to perform Analogue capture? I use a WinFast TV2000 XP WDM Video Capture, which is working very successfully under Windows 2000 for both UVS8 and UVS9. I grealty enjoy the features of UVS9. I would like to know how others have found Anlogue capture.

If you have further issues, please let us know more details, like the Operating System type and version, Version of UVS, and what type of hardware you using (The CPU type will indicate the motherboard type a bit, and what ist the speed of your hard drive. 5400 RPM are not the best because they are too slow, but 7500 are good, while I would love to have some 10,000 RPM raptor drives. I am using a 2 GH P4 CPU and two 7500 RPM disk drives, a 80GB HD for the Windows 2000, programs files in one partition, a second partion on this HD for General Data, a third partition (30GB which is used purely for Video capture, so that deftragmentation is not an issue), and a second 120 GB HD for Video projects (where defragmentation is not as important as it is on the video capture partition).

George.

[THoff]

I think you meant 7200RPM -- there are no 7500RPM drives.

[uhill]

Thank you both for info.

What do Device 0 and Device 1 refer to?

My Secondary IDE channel has Device 0 and Device 1. Device 0 was set to PIO, so I changed it to "DMA if available". It shows "Multi-Word DMA Mode 2" in Current Transfer Mode now. Device 1 was set to "DMA if available" and it shows Ultra DMA Mode 2.

My Primary IDE channel both Deviece 0 and Device 1 are set to "DMA if available" and both dispaly Ultra DMA Mode 5 in the Current Transfer Mode.

I use have VS9. Windows XP SP-2. 768 MB of RAM. P4 2 GHz.

[GeorgeK]

First of all, yes, thanks THoff, it is 7200 RPM drive.

As for the question

What do Device 0 and Device 1 refer to?

Usually motherboards have two IDE channels, a primary and a secondary (some of us would like more by default ).
Each IDE channel can have two devices, a master and a slave. Devices are usually Hard Drives or CD/DVD drives (CD ROMs or CD Buners, DVD ROMs or DVD Burners), however there are other devices which can be connected to an IDE channel.

As an example, I have two hard drives on my primary IDE channel, one is 80 GB and the other is 120 GB. The 80 GB is the master and has three partitions, a 20 GB C partition (often called the C: drive) which I use for my OS and programs like UVS9, a 25 GB D partition for my Data files, and a 30 GB E partition which I use for capture only.
The slave hard drive has two 60 GB partitions on which I keep Video Project I am currently working on.

My Secondary IDE channel has a DVD ROM drive and a DVD Burner.

This make four IDE devices.

My transfer modes is "DMA if available" too, giving a Ultra DMA Mode.

I hope this helps.

THoff, do you know why we are asked to turn off "Write Cache Enabled" on our disk drives? I assume this is because this is a Windows in computer memory cache, and if the cache is to suddenly need to write out a big chunk of data, it may delay system resources to the video capture for a second, causing some frames to be lost, but I cannot think of any other reason?

[maddrummer3301]

George,
>THoff, do you know why we are asked to turn off "Write Cache Enabled" on
>our disk drives?


When running a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on older motherboards
and older slower harddrives that use to be an issue.

Depends on the IDE drive and the controllers chipset on the MB.
Also, with DMA enabled releases the CPU from overhead letting the
Intel chipset take over the transfer of data to the drive letting the cpu
go back to processing the audio/video data.

That's why it's important to have 2 physical drives or more for DAW or
Video work.

One can figure it out. If you don't have much RAM and the program your
running eats up all the ram then there isn't much ram left except the paging
file to use with exception to the pre-allocated disk buffers at boot time.
(Bottlenecking).
That is a problem and one must install more ram to run that program.

The pro audio apps I have you leave "Write-cache" enabled via the
operating system and control
the process caching through the appllications software. You can turn off
write-caching enabled/disabled within the "preferences/setup" screen
of the audio application.
This works nice if your stuck using one physical harddisk where the
operating system and data are on the same physical disk.

Depending on one's CPU, motherboard, ram and setup there are
advantages to disabling write-caching on a drive.

All my drives are enabled. If my system drops frames it's due to
overloading the cpu. My system performs better with write-cache enabled
for all the drives. The system is powered from a UPS also so losing power
isn't an issue.

As you know not all programs handle memory efficiently, not to mention
any names.

MD

[THoff]

I leave write-behind caching enabled, doing otherwise will exact a performance penalty on the entire system, not just UVS. The reasoning with UVS appears to be that if you have caching enabled, you could lose more work in the event of a crash.

In my opinion, if a program benefits from not having writes cached and the programmers know this, they ought to force the data to be written to disk immediately by calling Flush...

[jchunter]

I always keep Write Caching disabled because Video Studio writes to quite a few different .ini and .dat files. I have a strong suspicion (not proof), that sometimes (e.g., when VS crashes), some of these writes don’t complete properly, which leaves theses files in an inconsistent state that can only be fixed by reinstalling. I posted information about this in the old forum – but it can no longer be recovered.

In any case, my reinstallation frequency has dropped to near zero with write caching disabled and I have experienced absolutely no performance limitations with any of the various phases of video editing. BTW, my system is a relatively modest 3GHz HT CPU.
John