Today I burned a Knoppix cd and did some testing. I used a demo of Nero Burning to burn the CD. When I booted it hung when I used the defaults. I checked the FAQ and it recommended using the nodma cheatcode. Sure enough it worked but the disk access was pitifully slow. After some research I found this page at the LinuxDevCenter. All of their recommendations worked for me but found
hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda
seemed to work the best for me. I will probably have to try a few more tests but the disk access was very respectable. After a little more research I found out that I could go to either -X68 which supports ATA66 or -X69 which supports ATA100.