On some motherboards, the bios is restrictive in letting you chose settings for your hard drive. IE: multi sector transfers and Logical block addressing. Both of wich increases overall harddrive performance in all versions of windows.

To Overcome this and enable these settings you can install EZ-BIOS on your hard drives via a simple little boot utility that you can get from either Maxtor or Western digital.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

The Maxtor Maxblast 3 boot disk will actualy give you more control over the EZ-BIOS settings.

Example: The following is the step by step procedures to adjust settings or to install/uninstall EZ-Bios via Maxblast:

Insert a system boot diskette into floppy disk drive A: drive and boot to
it.
Press the [Enter] key to accept the term of the license agreement and/or
to continue past any other miscellaneous prompts.
From the Main Menu, select "Advanced Options" and press the [Enter] key.
At this point, the Advanced Options sub-menu will appear.

After installing EZ-BIOS, XP will detect the new hardware and install an approprate ATA driver for your hard drive, Reboot and your done ^_^

Happy tweaking