Well, DMA is an abbrevation for 'Direct Memory Access'. Meaning that the chip concerned can read/write directly to memory. I.e. it doesn't need to use the main CPU to read/write, thus taking load of the CPU leaving that free to do more important stuff :-). With DMA data moves directly between chip<->RAM, without DMA it moves in the following fashion: chip<->CPU<->RAM.
In the case of the peg (and A1) this story concerns DMA of the IDE controller, supposedly the controller has hardware bugs.
Not 100% of that...(Bill Buck seems to be though and Alan Redhouse not (or something);-)).
