Who said Windows works better?

The reason for this post is the time I wasted this afternoon to enable DMA for a DVD burner in Windows, in order to burn a backup DVD at a decent speed. Apparently, the two optical drives are IDE while the HD is on a SATA controller. For no reason, DMA got turned off on the DVD burner (but not on the other drive).

Of course I tried everything I could, of course. It was very frustrating to reboot every time to test (probably due to the large hack called Registry) and of course not being able to get it working. Google searches did not get conclusive information, perhaps a BIOS bug or a firmware bug. On Linux, it’s just a matter of using

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hdparm -d 1 drivename

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What’s the easiest way? Obscure options of the device manager (which lists SATA channels and IDE channels with the same name) that only say “DMA if available” with no option to check what went wrong, or a simple command that outputs the result of the operation in real time?