hi all, i have a weird problem...when i am transferring files from my storage drive to my main drive it is taking an insane amount of time and when i look at my preformance i am using 100% of my cpu and i am having a continuous drop in memory usuage but it is not being shown where it is going. the storage drive is a maxtor 80gb 7200 hdd, w/ fat32 formatting. and the main drive is a 80gb 7200 / ntfs formating. could the different formats be causing this problem? and if so i was wondering if i converted the fat32 drive to mtfs would it solve this or would i have to just live w/ it. i have searched around for a way to convert the drive to ntfs, but i have forgotten where to do it. thanks.

other specs are in my sig

FAT 32 to NTFS is not significant really. You are right to make them both NTFS, however. Where both drives are on the same IDE cable that is significant. Place the primary master on the primary IDE channel and the secondary master on the secondary IDE channel. Then you achieve direct throughput of the data transfer. Also, when you open Task Manager you will see 100% CPU usage for a moment. That is a quirk with XP Task Manager. There is a post / fix for that, but I forget where.

ok i went ahead and converted the 2nd drive to ntfs. so i rana test on the cached and uncached disk speed , and i've found that on that drive i'm getting a 1.5mb/s speed which is really low. also still getting a 100% of cpu usuage could my primamry drive be causing problems w/ this??

Possibly. Are the drives defraged? Just one badly defragmented drive will cause this problem. What about the configuration I mentioned?

ok i have tried setting them as configured 1 on it's own cable and it still does it, i have defragged the main one but have since tried to defragg the secondary one and it takes forever as in in 24hours and only goes 20% complete..and i'm using diskkeeper 7.?

ok, i have a theory...it may be the ide cable or the board because after trying to defrag the drive it try's to analyze it and freeze's it's p***ing me off quite a bit..

Sounds more like there is not enough free storage space. How much free space do you have on each drive. Another place to look into is the swap file. Is it big enough and are you managing it manually or is Windows managing it. You have 1 GB of RAM. Some boards had problems with 1 GB of RAM and caused memory leaks.

i have about 15gb a drive free...the swap on the storage is set to 300min -700mb max. the main is 1500min-3500max.

well i have narrowed it down to ...it's either the ide's on the board,, or my board does not like ntfs. or it's the drive....

Tested out another independant drive?! Might answer some questions...

You might check your antivirus settings. My settings got changed from default files to all files and it cut my harddrive speed in half and my processor was almost tripled.

thanks good idea....i disabled my antivirus and things improved a bit...

Ah, then it is probally to many background services running. I run about 30 background services and that is to many. To learn more about background services visit Black Viper's Web Site http://www.blkviper.com/. One of if not the best site I have seen with heavy focus on removing background services.

thanks .....someone suggested to me that the power wattage of my psu could be not enough gonna try tonight asnd see....

ok i have completely removed norton 2003 and it seems that was the culprit. but the low uncacjed speed is definitely the ntfs..of well as long as it preforms well, thanks everybody for the help.