SATA Hard Drive not quite meeting expectations

I bought a new 160GB Hitachi Hard Drive to replace one of my 40GB Hard Drives which failed. I have reformatted it and installed Windows on it twice trying to fix a problem. The problem is that it just seems to be slow and has serious issues with multitasking. My system comes to a near standstill whenever I am installing anything, things start responding very slow and the mouse will skip. Also, the sound from my Sound Blaster Extigy skips horribly whenever the hard drive does anything else. Fortunately the motherboard's onboard audio works fine. Originally my installation of windows did not have SP1, so the hard drive was only 127GB. I heard that SP1 increased window's support for SATA drives. I have since slipstreamed SP2 into the ISO, reformatted, and reinstalled. It still performs no better than before and fixes no problems other than the capacity. The motherboard did not come with any SATA drivers but they were included in the RAID drivers which I loaded from floppy during the windows installation. The hard drive is not showing any external signs of failing. I will be ordering a new motherboard, processor, and RAM soon and am hoping that the problem will be corrected with the new motherboard's SATA controller. Does anyone have any idea what else may be causing this problem.

 

The motherboard does not provide any SATA drivers (I have checked the motherboard site and the site for the controller chipset). The drivers are part of the RAID drivers I think. I will try installing the latest Nforce drivers now.

 

I installed the new Chipset drivers off the motherboard's website and I am now using my laptop to post this because my computer is sitting in the windows loading screen indefinately. The little blue bar the scrolls by stops at equal intervals for a second before continuing. It has been doing this for about 10 minutes now, I wait to see if it is going to make it. If not then it is back to loading the last known good configuration.

 

As your problem was there before you got your sata drive, I would guess check your ram. This sounds like a classic example of a faulty ram chip. Also check your BIOS settings and ensure they are correct.

 

The problem wasn't there before I got the hard drive but that doesn't mean something couldn't have happened while I was installing the hard drive. I have reset my Bios and completely reconfigured it so I don't think that is the problem. I don't have any extra DDR ram to swap in on this computer so I will just have to wait till I buy my new stuff here soon, which I am hoping will magically make all my problems go away.

 

It also could be your sound card drivers. Since it is crackling, try uninstalling the drivers. Some video drivers my cause it to. Get SiSoft Sandra and run a bench mark. See if that can find anything wrong?