🚀 go-pugleaf

OK, here is the problem.  I recently purchased a Creative 8432 CDRW
drive.  As per standard operating procedure, I when to control
panel/system/devices/cdrom and right clicked the Creative, hit
properties, and checked the DMA box.  I rebooted, and everything is
fine, the box stays checked.  I carry on for a week, and decided to
benchmark things.  I used the benchmark from come.to/cdspeed to get
some figures.  (Is there a more informative one out there?)

I have come to the conclusion that despite the fact that the DMA
checkmark is checked, the drive is not in UDMA mode.  The first
suspicion has been the large CPU utilization figures displayed in
various CD utility programs (Nero, Audiograbber, to name a few).
CDSpeed, when I tested the drive, reported figures of 4% at 1x, 8% at
2x, 17% at 4x, and 25% at 8x.  That seems far too high.  Especially
when I compare those numbers with other similar drives, and they all
turn in results of 1%, 2%, 4%, 8%.  As well, when measuring transfer
rates, the drive starts at about 14x (about right) and climbs with
RPMs staying at 14x (correct?) until it hits about 21x at 20 minutes
into the disk.  At that point, transfer rates stop climbing and come
down until the end of the disk being 20x or so.  RPMs also drop
accordingly.  This is far less than the 32x it is supposed to do at
the end of the disk, and a rate the other similar dives are achieving.

So I started digging around in BIOS in my P3B-F.  But the BIOS will
not get the CD to run with DMA 2.  If I set it up as a [CD-ROM] then I
can set PIO to [4], and DMA to [2] but it will fail on POST.  I must
set DMA to [Disable] to have the drive actually pass.  If I set the
drive up on [AUTO] then the dives is recognised at the Creative 8432
Yada-Yada-Yada.  The PIO will be set to [4], but DMA is [Disabled].
If I manually set the DMA to anything else, it flips back before I can
leave the screen.

Am I totally barking up the wrong tree here?  Is DMA in BIOS a
non-issue?  Does Windows have the ability to over ride that.  And how
do I explain my poor CPU utilization and transfer times?  Am I doing
ANYTHING wrong, or could it be drivers?  HELP!

Other than that, it seems to work fine.  Hard to say since I have
never owned a CDRW before.  It burns at 8x (have not done anything
else) and runs games and copies data and audio fine.  I have made a
fair share of costers, but I know a few of those were my fault, not
the drive.  The others can be written off as bad media/bad luck.

In case you need to know, here is my system.

Asus P3B-F, with BIOS rev. 1004.
PIII-500
128MB Ram (2x64MB Cas2, slots 0 and 1)
Creative Labs Annihalator Pro 32MB AGP
PCI slots 1-4,6 empty.
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live MP3+ (PCI 5)
3COM 10BastT Ethernet card (ISA)
Mitsubishi (?) 1.44MB Floppy
Maxtor 27GB ATA-66 HDD (Primary Master)
Western Gigital 10.2GB ATA-33 HDD (Primary Slave)
Creative MK4214 8432 CDRW (Secondary Master, Firmware 1.01 if it
matters)
Old repackaged AOpen 12x CD-ROM (Secondary Slave, PIO 2, having it
disconnected does not solve poblem.)
Windows 98 (1st ed. Patched with Windows Update to whatever the latest
patches are)

As an aside, I was poking around and poked at the Hard Disk
controllers in the Control Panel/System/Device Manager.  I Noticed
that the Bus Master Controler was set up to defualt.  I changed it to
Both IDE Channels (?) and for a fleeting moment I did get low CPU
utilization times (1%....8%) in CDSPEED.  When I awoke in the morning,
it had reverted back to normal.  <Sigh>.



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Chris
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