Fresh Install--file copy and install are super slow

[Quick420]

I freshly formatted then started to install stuff,however I've noticed that games take......ages to install.Games that used to install at roughly 10mins now take 30 etc etc.If I copy large files from one spot to another they take ridiculous amount of time..I ran hdtach and came up with burst speed of 120.7,random access speed 13.2 ms,cpu utilization 2%,and average read speed 48.7 Everest also shows my drive to be running in udma mode6(ata133) so thats correct.I ran ad-aware etc nothing came up.I've never encountered this before,my game performance is perfect.For example opening a big rar file from a game iso takes a looooooooooooooooooong time,specs below.Has anyone experienced this anomolie before???

[rewt]

Your benchmarks make the hard drives speed seem fine. However we don't have any information about how your system was set up before. I noticed you have 2 x 250GB drives. Were they in RAID 0 array before? RAID 0 would have increased performance somewhat.

Also, what is your system's partition structure like?

And third, do you have all the proper drivers installed?

[Quick420]

No these drives were never in raid0.Right now I'm using 1 ide drive only,on the primary ide channel,a 250gb Maxtor 8mb cache,ata-133-enabled in bios and hardware manager.Problems were evident right after install,without chipset drivers installed(not necessasarily needed).I installed q4 and it took over 1/2 hr.I installed the 4in1 drivers from via(newest)except for the agp driver(the winxp-sp2 agp driver is better)unistalled q4 and re-installed it.It still took over 1/2 hr.I fire it up and play and boom headshot 60fps at medium details...right on the money.I cant quite put my finger on it but something just isnt right here,installing is taking waaay too long.I'll keep poking and prodding,it's sounds like the ide drivers are not playing nice with the chipset,or perhaps it's failing?

[rewt]

Ya got me. I've never experienced anything like that before.

Then again, I never installed XP to a 250GB drive either. I always set up a partition somewhere around 12 GB.

I've also used both VIA and nForce chipsets with nothing like that ever happening on either one.

Computer problems can be very difficult to figure out sometimes. I feel your pain.

[Quick420]

Thnx for looking Rewt,I'll do some more googling or maybe a possible install of windows xp-home(buddy has a unopened copy) if I dont find an answer.I have a new rig coming soon but this one needs to be running correctly before I part with it.

[Quick420]

Problem solved,I didnt realize my usb 250gb external (with all my tunes on it) was causing problems.As soon as I unplug it speeds are back to normal.So here's what I did.....considering the low cost of the external drive $69 Canadian I took it apart to fing a wd250gb caviar inside,so I set it to slave and installed it like any other ide drive and my system is running perfect again.I think if I can find 20-40gb drive I'll put it in the old case and use it again.