2 HDD

are you using hub or switch...

if its hub replace it with switch a

 do check with firewall settings or antivirus settings

have you check the rpm of your HDD?

you can try to connect the second HDD in the second IDE to check the system speed

I suggest you follow Nikkoli's comment. In your case, this is the bottleneck of the system.

Yes Nikkoli is correct, you want to separate those channels to gain the peak performance. Not sure what motherboard you have but if you want maximum performance I would see if that machine has SATA and take the new HD back and install it via SATA. If not uses Nikkoli's comment as the best way to fix it, also make sure you do a disk check and defrag on all drives.

In addition, you might want to see if 512 K RAM is sufficient , and that no page swapping is occurring.

I hope this helps !

@ apitbajpai
I think you posted here by mistake.

@ Nikkoli
Now i have placed 1HDD on Primary IDE on Slave and other 2HDD on Secondary IDE on Master
and i have removed CD-Rom from system, as it is never used on this system.

@ danieldr
rpm not sure. I guess it should work cause it was working properly earlier on same setup.

@ Salvosg
Ya i have done that.

@ SysExpert
Page swapping you mean Virtual Memory?
Should i disable Virtual Memeory you mean?
But i guess its not recomended.

I will post back with results. Later.

>
Now i have placed 1HDD on Primary IDE on Slave and other 2HDD on Secondary IDE on Master
and i have removed CD-Rom from system, as it is never used on this system.

Hopefully this is just a slip of wording...

You can only have 1 master per IDE cable, so you will have 1 master on your primary IDE and 1 master on your Secondary IDE, then the third HDD will be a slave on either cable.  I recommend that you put it on the secondary IDE, and make sure the OS is on the Primary IDE Master HDD.

One word of caution -- if you are now going to have 3 HDDs, whatever cable has 2, is going to be slow still.  If you are planning on having a computer with a number of HDDs, you should start considering one that has SATA so you can have each HDD on its own cable, or SCSI

@ war1
I mean this...

Primary IDE Channel>Master>Nothing
                                >Slave>Maxtor 40GB HDD(With Operating System WIndows XP)

Secondary IDE Channel> Master>Western Digital 40GB HDD

Is it nesesary to keep HDD on Master position only?? Or in Slave its OK?
And CD-Rom drive has been completely removed from the system.

If there is only 1 drive, it wont matter, but typical convention is to put it as Master anyway.

yea, might as well take up that master slot unless it becomes a "cable wont reach" thing.

Thanks Nikkoli