Slow hard drive fix tip

My second hard drive was dog slow. I was considering using it for some FS9 scenery, so did some performance checks. This drive is a standard Maxtor ATA133 drive. I ran HD Tach on it, and only got a 7 MB/s sustained and CPU usage > 99%. But all the checks I ran (looked at the BIOS on my MSI K8N Neo2) SiSoft, and Maxtor Max Blast all said it was running UDMA6 (I remember in the past, you had to run a drive utility to get the drive to run at UDMA speed, but this drive was set for that out of the box). So I started some web searching, and came across a link to MS KB 256086, applies to WinXP and Win 2000. What this KB covers, is that it turns out XP can reset your drive to PIO mode if it decides there are "too many" time outs. It recommends a hotfix that is a newer version of the driver ATAPI.SYS, but this seems to be from before SP2, and my current ATAPI.SYS seems to be newer than the hotfix one. The check is to open the device manager and look at the properties for the P-ATA IDE interface. Open the tab for the proper channel, and it will show you the settings for the master and slave on that channel:(Note that this shot is from AFTER I changed settings, not "as found":http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/131185.jpgIn my case, I did NOT have the "Let BIOS set transfer rate" box checked, and the transfer mode box was showing PIO. There was also an exclamation alert saying that my device was slowed by XP. There was a work around provided in the KB article, and also a registry hack. I did the work around (but didn't edit the registry) but had the same results as before: PIO mode. So I simply checked the "Let BIOS set" box, and now it indicates it is using ATA133/UDMA6. HD Tach also shows my drive performing in the ballpark for ATA133. I assume there is some sort of problem that is causing XP to set the drive speed slow (maybe I will swap cables) but so far I can't detect any problems reading or writing the drive.scott s..