I have two physical drives on my system. Whenever I try to write or read to one of them (60MB Maxtor), my CPU usage spikes up to 100% and the transfer goes very slowly. I just reformatted the drive, it now has one NTFS partition on it, but that did nothing. I checked the wires. I've had this drive for several years, and the problems started fairly recently. Writing to the other drive (any of its three partitions) is just fine, and it actually takes about ten times as long to transfer to or from my problem drive than between partitions on the other drive. It seems like the problem isn't continuous, when I'm writing a number of fairly small (<5MB) files I can see that a number of them often transfer quickly. Does anybody have any suggestions? Or would it be best for me to just buy a new drive?

You could replace the cable and see if that helps. Have you ran scandisk and defraged the drive lately?

I actually deleted the partition and recreated it. I also tried another cable. I believe the problems may have begun around the same time that I updated my BIOS, but I don't know if it was at exactly the same time or if it has naything do do with it.