Hard drive is VERY Slooooooow?

Hello guys, I am having a little trouble with my hard drive. I am running windows XP with service pack 2 all updated etc....my hard drive is a Maxtor 250GB ata drive. When I first installed the drive it would not recognize the full 250GB, it only showed 137GB because my system is an Asus A7A 1.2Ghz processor. I had to download and update the bios so that it would support the new drive which I did. So then I ran the MAX BLAST software that came with the drive which would only let me make a new partition on the drive since it had the operating system on it, which is no big deal.....so I created a G: drive with the partition of 104GB which is good because I means I am able to use the whole drive. But now it seems to be running really slow so I went to PC Pitstop and ran a few tests....it said that my drive was unusally slow. The test said that my drive was running at un uncached speed of
2MB/second when it should be running closer to 26MB/second and that I should defrag the drive etc....which I did but still no luck. I made sure that DMA was enabled (it was) I made sure the write cache was enabled (it was too) I tried updating the drivers, but they are all updated already......I'm not sure what else to do except reformat the whole drive and start from scratch which I really don't want to do

Does anyone know what I might be able to do to fix this ?

 

You wouldn't happen to be running FAT versus NTFS would you, also you could down load CCleaner from Major Geeks to remove extra garbage, also Everest diagnostic software again from Major Geeks could point the finger at what is happening to your HD. Hope that helps

 

I am running NTFS on the drive, but I also have a slave drive for storage that is using fat32 but I was told that is ok to have.

 

In the first instance have you looked in the device manager to confirm what XP is detecting for this drive and what speed has been alocated.

Good luck