Hi all. I'd be very grateful for any help with this problem, which is driving me to distraction! I recently updated my PC's storage with a PCI SATA card and a 320GB Maxtor SATA HDD. The install (which included a fresh install of XP Pro onto an EIDE drive and the latest drivers for the SATA card) went fine. Using the XP disk management console, after a bit of messing, I partitioned the HDD into two partitions - ~270GB, and 25GB. At some stage during this process, it made the partitions dynamic. The problem I have is that the disk performance is very variable, and accessing either partition sometimes causes whole system to lock up (no screen changes, and no input recognised) for 5-10 secs at a time at times while it's accessed. Both partitions can be painfully slow to read from - sometimes less than 1MB/sec. This always happens when reading lots of smaller files; larger files sometimes copy at 30MB/sec, but then at other times at <1MB/sec. Wondering if the problem was the drive being dynamic, I've tried deleting its partitions, and following MS's instructions (again, using the XP disk management console) to turn it back into a basic disk; it refuses to work, and I get an error message. I'm at a loss, and my new storage is next to useless. Any ideas? Thanks
