Installed new hard drive but seems to have slow performance

Truthfully it may take that long on certain systems.

Is your hardrive 7200 RPM or 5400?

What size buffer does the hard drive have?

Do you have any other devices connected to the ribbon cable that the hard drive is on?

Is ultra DMA enabled?

Are you transfering data from hard drive to hard drive?

Are all the drivers up to date?

Tell us a little about the system.

well i cut it down to about 2.5 mins for an 800mb file but according t stats on the new, it should only take about 30secs to copy that data
hard drive is 7200rpm
8mb buffer i believe
there are 2 hard drives on that ata cable- the original and this one
yes it is udma enabled
yes i am transferring  data from one to the other- both on same cable
dirvers (?) are up to date - the ones i could find anyway- none actually availabe :P

what would u like to know aobut the system? im sure not the colour ;)

Don't believe what you read about the spects because those transfer rates are in theory and in a controlled environment with no other hardware installed.

If you are transfering data from one drive to another on the same cable, the speed will be dictated by the slower drive. Mainly because the slower drive can't write as fast but IDE devices communicate synchronously. This means that they must communicate unsing a common clock time.

The best thing to do is get the target hard disk off the same cable. So that you can rule out sync problems and controller bottle necks.

like chris mentioned , that's your problem. Two drives on the same cable are causing the bottle neck. Switch some IDE devices around so each drive is on its own cable , if you can you can always get an IDE expansion card

Make sure you don't have the new hard drive on the same ide channel as the cd drive, as this will reduce the speed of the hard disc to that of the cd

Like chris said take the slave drive off the same cable.  Two IDE drives on the same cable working at the same time become very slow like you seem to have come across.  What i would do, and this would be a little time consuming.  Take and put the new hard drive on the IDE controller of your CD Rom.  You would have to go in and set the bios as such.  This would make your system run smoother untill you get the data transfered.  If you did not want to keep it this way then change it back when you are done.

...if you've only got two ide channels as most computers have, then you'll have to have both hard drives on the same cable because having a hard drive on the same channel as a cd drive screws things up royally.  Just make sure you've got the faster newer drive set as the master, if you haven't already.  This should help speed things up.  I've got 2 drives on one cable .. 1 udma33 1 udma100 and they work fine.  the udma100 one is the master tho..and it's only 30gig i dunno whether bigger drives are slower tho..i doubt it.  Could just need defragging..?

abugintheground:
I never said that you could not have two hard drives on one IDE.  You can however only have one of those two drives working at the same time other wise they run slower than dirt.  It does not screw your computer up to but a HD with a CD rom as long as you have set the HD to master not only on the jumper settings, but also in the bios.  
It sounds to me as though he is trying to transefer data from one hard drive to another.  If this is true it would be slow for him to do this on the same IDE controller.

Saet,
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