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I'd like to add something to the tips for increasing ripping speed. I came onto this by complete accident. Most of us have heard that sometimes Windows XP will throw your IDE devices back into a slow PIO transfer mode without your knowledge (or approval). But how about it hiding a faster mode from you altogether? Well I use an Artec 16x DVD-Rom, and with DVD Decrypter I used to get ripping speeds max out at about 6x or 7x but usually was around 4x or 5x. In my Device Manager it always listed these devices as being in Multi-Word DMA Mode 2. I thought this was the fastest mode my machine could run in. Well I was taking a look through the BIOS settings at startup the other day and I came across the settings for the IDE devices. There were settings like this:
Primary Master PIO: AUTO
Primary Slave PIO: AUTO
Secondary Master PIO: AUTO
Secondary Slave PIO: AUTO
Primary Master DMA: DISABLED
Primary Slave DMA: DISABLED
Secondary Master DMA: DISABLED
Secondary Slave DMA: DISABLED
I have my hard drive on Primary Master, nothing on Primary Slave. NEC DVD writer is on Secondary Master, Artec DVD-Rom is Secondary Slave. First I tried to Disable all those PIO modes listed above. It would not let me. It gave me the options of Auto and numbers from 1 to 4 or 5. I left them on AUTO. But I could ENABLE the DMA in these settings! Remember, even though it lists DMA modes as DISABLED here, I was using all my devices in Multi-Word DMA Mode 2. However, after changing these settings in the BIOS and restarting, all my devices list as ULTRA DMA MODE 2. My ripping speeds on the Artec have nearly doubled! The NEC may also write better on cheap media (not exactly sure about that one yet). I am getting better performance all around, CD/DVD Rom read speeds, hard drive read times, everything... I have gone from averaging 4x-6x dvd ripping speeds on the Artec to 9x-12x!
Maybe some of you, like me, can benefit from tweaking those BIOS settings. See, I knew the BIOS could do things like that, but since the devices already were listing in Multi Word DMA, I didn't think anythink else needed to be enabled. So give it a shot, see if it helps you too!
God bless!
Mike.
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