I've used a 6 foot DB9 cable to reach the motor and it seems fine.
In the driver you can not change the microstep mode, but you can adjust the delay.
Also you described the motor making a noise and warming up. That is the enabled mode. It's not desirable. There are two revisions of the board. Rev 1 enable pin pulled low, Rev 2 enable pin pulled high (if I recall chevron). If you bought it recently you probably have rev 2 and need to set that in the indi driver.

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