Description
This item is from the Yet Another
Enhanced IDE/Fast-ATA/ATA-2 FAQ, by John Wehman and Peter den
Haan with numerous contributions by others. (v1.92).
07.05. Busmastering drivers don't do much...
First of all, busmastering will generally not do much with the
transfer rates themselves. What it does is relieve the CPU from the
chore of shovelling data around, so that it can do something more
useful. However if you tend to do only one thing at a time, or you're
running a benchmark, the extra CPU time can't be used for anything and
busmastering will have no appreciable effect.
Second, you will not see any decrease in CPU usage with the System
Monitor in Win95 because it tracks the amount of time spent in the
"system idle" loop. However, with a pending I/O operation, the system
doesn't spend its spare cycles there, but in the "waiting for I/O to
complete" loop.
Third, you need to use DMA to profit from the improved data integrity
and enhanced transfer rates of Ultra-ATA.
Continue to:
Share and Enjoy
Bookmark this story so others can enjoy it:
Tags
pc, hardware, faq, frequently asked questions, repair, computer, IDE, Fast-ATA, ATA-2, harddisk, hd
