My computer currently has two IDE type ATA hard drives and one SATA/150 hard drive. The read speed of the SATA drive is extremely slow. When I burn data from my HD to a dvd with Nero, the IDE drives are able to be read fast enough for my burner to burn at 16x but if I try to burn anything from my SATA drive, Nero says that the read speed is only fast enough for me to burn at 2x!

I AM able to read and write to the SATA drive just fine but the speed is just slow. My bios is set to recognize both ATA and SATA. I don't see any other bios settings that seem to be relevant.

Any ideas?? Thanks!

Intel P4 2.80c w/HT, 800 MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache,Zalman 7000B-Cu hs/fan
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe MOBO
2GB Kingston PC3200 RAM 4x512
ATI AIW 9600 128MB vid
Vantec 400W PSU
250 SATA,200 EIDE,

What file system is on those drives? Is it NTFS like the other drives? What about swap space?

some BIOS's have a '32-bit mode' feature. Check to see that its enabled. Also, give it a good defrag.

Have all the motherboard drivers been installed? One possibility is that the SATA drive is not using DMA. Go to the Device Manager and check the properties of the SATA drive.
As an aside, there's a free program (HD Tach) available to check drive speed.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

Thanks for all of the responses. I forgot to mention that the SATA drive is divided into 3 partitions. All files on all drives are NTFS. All 3 partitions have been defragged and there is plenty of open space remaining on each virtual drive. I let XP choose the swap file size.

I ran HD Tach and it rated my 2 regular ATA hard drives at 91 & 93MB/s which is not too bad. When it tested my SATA drive it was only reading at 3.5 MB/s!

I think I found where the problem is though thanks to ham30. I have two listings under the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" pull down for "Primary IDE Channel". The first one shows that both device 0 and 1 are using "Ultra DMA Mode 5". But the second "Primary IDE Channel" device 0 is set to DMA if available but the current Transfer Mode is PIO Mode and I can't change that. Device 1 is set up for DMA if available but it says current transfer mode is Non Applicable.

Does this indicate a driver problem and if so is it a motherboard driver that I need to get from Asus or a hard drive driver that I need to get from Maxtor?

Intel P4 2.80c w/HT, 800 MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache,Zalman 7000B-Cu hs/fan
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe MOBO
2GB Kingston PC3200 RAM 4x512
ATI AIW 9600 128MB vid
Vantec 400W PSU
250 SATA,200 EIDE,