Help no DMA option

[TeknoBug]

I got an Acer laptop last week and it's not a bad laptop but the hard drive is showing some significantly underwhelming performance and sustained file transfers shows 15-22MB/sec, in device manager there are no ATA Channel # listed under the ATA/ATAPI controller section. I searched for a way to enable it via regedit but no luck, it's as if the laptop's motherboard wasn't made to use DMA?

 

[Hardlin]

Without more information, I don't know if anyone can help you with this. Please post the Acer model number and the HDD model too. If you don't have any third party tools, you can use MSInfo32 to get the HDD information.

 

[Ketchup]

My laptop only has one as well (Intel 7 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller). I think that is pretty normal nowadays for a laptop and a recent OS. Do you know what chipset it has?

 

[Cerb]

MSInfo32 doesn't show ATA mode on my box. The OP might need to get a 3rd-party utility to check it out easily, such as CrystalDiskInfo, HD Tach/Tune, Sandra, etc..

Now, there's no way your laptop wasn't made to use DMA. If it's a current gen notebook, it will support 6Gbps SATA (~550MBps), so something is very wrong.

 

[TeknoBug]

HD Tune says UDMA mode 6 is enabled yet the HDD responds so slowly, could be a lemon drive. I have a spare that I need to copy files from before I throw it into the laptop to see how it runs.

It's an Acer Aspire E1 522-5603, 750GB WD 5400rpm SATA3. I can't find the chipset info.

 

[Cerb]

UDMA 6 is ATA 133. If it's running in IDE emulation, that should still be enough to saturate the drive, and get you 50-100MBps, when copying large files (otherwise, you'll have 300MBps). I'm leaning towards the drive being super untrustworthy.

But, since you can check, see if any of the important SMART stats look bad, like pending sector count, uncorrectable read count, reallocated sector count, and DMA CRC error count (ideally, all should be 0).

 

[TeknoBug]

It definitely was a HDD problem, it even runs like crap in an external enclosure plugged into my PC's eSATA. I slapped a 120GB SSD into the laptop and cloned it and all is good now.