Getting better hard-drive performance

Since Intel and Quantum developed Ultra-DMA (UDMA meaning Ultra Direct Memory Access) the speeds of drive read/write have been steadily increasing. With Windows 98^® you may actually have drives that are UDMA-(various numbers defining the version) installed but aren't taking full advantage of them.

Using something like Belarc you can find out the information about your drives to see if they support UDMA or not. Both optical and hard-drives can support this feature and many do. Unfortunately many people aren't taking advantage of this additional speed.

Belarc:
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

Once you know if your drives support this feature you can try this:

1. Right click My Computer and select properties
2. Click the Device Manager tab
3. Select Disk Drives and then select your drive(s) in question
4. Select Properties
5. Click on Settings tab
6. Put a tick in the DMA checkbox
7. Close the warning box
8. Reboot for this to take effect

Warning:
This will probably cause your system to crash if you do not have DMA hardware and try to enable this. You will then want to enter safe mode in order to reverse the changes made. However, check first with the above mentioned tool and you should be all set.

OS: 98 > General
Date: 10/15/05

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