Speed-test results not good

[Princess Platypus]

Following the addition of a new hard drive (one that has been giving me
trouble), my system performance deteriorated. I went to Device Manager
and ran a speed test on my IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

Drive #1 (boot drive; 160GB) has its transfer mode automatically set to
Serial ATA DMA. Results of the speed test: theoretical limit is 150.0,
burst speed 56.5, sustained speed 37.1.

Drive #2 (the new, troublesome drive; 200GB) is also a serial ATA
drive, but it has had its transfer mode automatically re-set to PIO.
Results of the speed test: theoretical limit is 16.0, burst speed 2.7,
sustained speed of 2.7. There is a note that the transfer mode has been
downgraded due to
"excessive transfer errors to this device."

Drive #3 (old drive; 30GB) is a parallel ATA drive. Transfer mode is
set to Ultra DMA 6 - Ultra 133. Results of the speed test: theoretical
limit is 133.3, burst speed 75.2, sustained speed 15.5.

I reformatted Drive #2 and that didn't improve things at all.

Any help welcome and appreciated.

 

[David Vair]

Drive read errors may be due to physical defects on the drive. See if there are any diagnostic
utilities available from the manufacturer to test it.

 

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply. I ran the manufacturer's diagnostics and the drive
passed all of them.

I suspect that one of the things (if not the thing) that caused my computer
to tell me the drive had excessive transfer errors was because I aborted two
back-up files that I was writing to the drive (they were huge and were going
to take days).

Would successfully completing several copies to the drive help at all?

Any other ideas?