Hard drive is slowing way down

I have a 20 GB Maxtor hard drive (model # 52049H4) that has slowed to a crawl. It is currently maxxing out at 4 MB/sec with an average speed of 1 MB/sec. The hard drive is for storage and contains no OS. It is formated as NTFS.

It is set as a Master on its own IDE channel. The motherboard supports 100 MB/sec.

I downloaded HD Tune 2.10 and ran Error Scan. It found no errors.

I downloaded a Maxtor DOS diagnostic program and ran it from boot-up. It ran for 7 hours and found no errors.

I have tried different cables and different computers and even under different OS's. Virus scan shows no viruses.

Any ideas?

 

Donno if its your case but iv seen drives that get a lot slower befor thay die and still not show errors till thay finaly go .....Is UDMA enabled in the bios ?? Is the PIO mode set to auto ?? In any case id back up the data on it ......

 

I think it is dying. It sometimes will make a loud click noise. However, it is a single click and it is entirely random. The disk utilities I have downloaded say it is fine.

And the answer is Yes to both of your questions.

 

bump...

Any other ideas?