In the process of rewriting the pages for the new domain,  I have completely rewritten many of the articles.  For the NT UDMA tests, I have decided to just clean up the text and charts a bit and leave the information as it was on the previous site.  I think that the information is layed out in a logical order and gives a good overview of the progression of DMA and UDMA drivers that were and are available for NT. 

DMA, UDMA, or What?
While taking a MCSE certification course, I ended up with NT Server and Workstation software for my home computer.  Being a bit short on storage this meant another HD; and as usual, I'm interested in getting the best performance I can with what I have.  DMA / UDMA drivers come to mind again.

While waiting for the introduction of Service Pack 4 with the anticipated NT 4 UDMA drivers, there are a few choices available to increase the transfer rate of your UDMA capable disk drives.  While information seems to be somewhat lacking on Microsoft's and hard disk manufacturers' sites, some motherboard manufacturers' sites do provide the necessary drivers.  Rather than limiting myself to my board's manufacturer, I'd checked any manufacturer whose boards use my former chipset, Intel's TX, though the information on these pages also applies to any of the Intel chipsets that recognize UDMA.

To add to the confusion as I looked for information on this subject, there were the usual well meaning, but inaccurate posts that appear in some of the newsgroups and bulletin boards.  "There are no DMA drivers for NT.  There are no UDMA drivers for NT.  There is no NT."  You get the picture.  By no stretch of the imagination do I consider myself an expert in this, but no matter what you call them, or how they work, there are drivers that do improve the performance of my UDMA drives in NT.  What came as a bit of a surprise after my experiences with Win95 was that Microsoft's drivers were not necessarily the hot ticket.

The tests are broken down into a couple of sections with the MS, Intel 2.01.03, and Tyan 4021 drivers listed together and a seperate page for the HP Vectra (Intel 2.02.01) and each additional driver that will be tested.