Thinkpads Forum

I recently tried watching a DVD on my TransNote using the extenal drive bay; this accessory lets you attach drives intended for the Ultra Slim Bay in the X2 dock or 600X using a 16-bit IDE pc card. Let's call the performance "less than optimal." I checked around in Device Manager and there don't appear to be any options for bumping up the performance (like setting the DMA channels to something or other).

Question 1: Is this as good as it gets? I know it's only 16-bit, but I thought a 6X DVD drive could do better than this. Not a big deal - I usually rip the movies to my hard drive and watch from there anyway, but I'm curious.

Question 2: I've also got the same gadget, made for the Ultra Bay 2000 of later ThinkPads, and it has the option of pc card and USB connectors. Will the USB dongle work on the older EDB? Looks like it'll fit, but thought I'd ask before I risked it. USB 1.1 performance can't be much worse, and I'd get to leave my wireless card in the slot.

This could be COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT with your dock, but the Dock / Dock II user guide states the following:

By default, the Ultrabay 2000 drive within the ThinkPad Dock or the ThinkPad
Dock II is set up in the PIO transfer mode. This is due to the driver design. For
applications such as viewing a DVD and writing a CD-RW, the Ultrabay 2000
drive has to be set up in the DMA transfer mode.

1. Click Start -> Settings -> Control Panel.
2. Double-click the System icon.
3. Click the Hardware tab.
4. Click the Device Manager button.
5. Click View.
6. Click Devices by Type.
7. Click + at the left of the ″IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.″
8. Double-click the second Primary IDE Channel.
9. Click the Advanced Settings tab.
10. Click the down arrow at the Transfer Mode in the Device 0.
11. Select ″DMA if available.″
12. Restart the system.

Thanks for the tip - I checked that and the settings were already optimized. I'm beginning to think it's strickly a bandwidth limitation; I've got no problems when using my Targus DVD/CD-RW drive.

If I am correct - your transnote is a 600 mhz Pentium III? I think it's as good as it gets. Choppy DVD playback was an issue back on the Pentium IIIs less than 1 ghz without hardware decoders. Try a different player perhaps?

a31pguy wrote:If I am correct - your transnote is a 600 mhz Pentium III? I think it's as good as it gets. Choppy DVD playback was an issue back on the Pentium IIIs less than 1 ghz without hardware decoders. Try a different player perhaps?

I think your information is off - I can play DVDs smoothly on my 300MHz PII, using PowerDVD and no hardware decoder.

I do know that to smooth the playback I had to enable DMA on the drive (ultraslimbay drive). Epbrown, have you checked for such an option in the drive properties on this external drive of yours?

Rob

Perhaps. If I am completely off - then, of course, I apologize. The transnote uses an bridged PCI bus to dock the ATA DVD player. (You can run the intel app accelerator tool to see the modes it can use or use the control panel too look at the ide drive interface). You should be able to get the DVD into DMA mode. The DVD player using the dock might only be capable of DMA in ATA mode 2. My a31p with it's dock has a similar configuration and dvd playback in the dock was spotty and playback in the ultrabay was not. So you're probably right -the dvd in the dock is probably at issue than than the speed of the cpu. But the transnote doesn't have a ultrabay - so the dock is the only way besides using the USB or PCMCIA slots.

a31pguy wrote:So you're probably right -the dvd in the dock is probably at issue than than the speed of the cpu. But the transnote doesn't have a ultrabay - so the dock is the only way besides using the USB or PCMCIA slots.

I just reread the thread, and realized that he's using a 16-bit PC card to connect the DVD drive to the machine. I am thinking that might also be contributing to the choppiness.

Connecting through a 32-bit version of the card(assuming such an animal exists) might make a difference, but then he's back to taking his wireless card out.

Epbrown, you mention using a Targus drive with better results - how does that connect to the Transnote?

I've pretty much written this off as the fault of the 16-bit card included with the Portable drive Bay. I've also got a PDB 2000, which is the next generation, but it doesn't appear to be 32-bit either - at least, there's no gold strip on the pc card. The Targus drive I have is old and long discontinued, but it's 32-bit and playback is fine.

Well that makes sense then. 16-bit pcmcia versus 32-bit card bus.