Intel DX48bt2 motherboard

I cant seem to find mention of DMA settings for the hard drives in device management. All the drives are sata, I have no IDE drives and IDE is disabled in bios.

What got me looking at this is because when accessing a couple of my drives, there can sometimes be a pause before it starts reading the drive. This mostly happens on my z: drive but can happen on my F: with less frequency.

What would the likely cause of this be? Ive installed all the necessary drivers from Intels website.

I see the same thing here, and attribute the behavior to the hard drive having to spin up again after the power saving schema in effect allowed the hard drive to spin down after an interval of inactivity. I think the deafult power schema sets that for 15 minutes, or something like that.

See contol panel > system and security > power options then click on "change plan settings" for the plan in effect on your system, then change advanced settings. One of the options will control the spin-down for hard drives.