I'm supposed to be going 300 MB/s theoretical (235 MB/s maximum) rate with this hard disk. I'm going far much less than this. Try UDMA6-class speeds (Ultra-ATA 133). Every time there's a task being run, in the background or otherwise, even without any indication of processor load, my system slows down! And I know it's been defragged often, this often happens during a read/write/erase/move operation.
I would try looking for updates but there's hardly ever any updates for the MCP61 chipset anymore.