Hard Drive DMA (Direct Memory Access)
DMA, in all of its flavors, is vastly superior to the PIO data transfer method to which most computers default. For those of you who are not familiar with DMA and what is does, DMA (or UDMA) is the process in which a hard drive can transfer data directly to the system RAM with minimal involvement of the processor. When the computer is using the standard PIO mode, the processor has to direct the hard drive’s every move, which is detrimental to performance.
One of the nice features of Win2k is that you can enable DMA without any of the problems inherent to installing it on the Win9x platform. Why is that? It is because the system will dynamically check for compatibility if you set it to do so, rather than forcing the setting upon an incompatible hard drive. To enable DMA, you will need to once again get access to the Device Manager. Scan down to your IDE controller and select the Primary IDE channel. Go to the advanced settings tab. For each device, set its device type to Auto Detection, and its transfer mode to DMA if available (this works for your CD-ROM as well). Repeat the process for the Secondary IDE channel and then reboot. You should see a very nice performance boost.