Windows 7 - SATA Hard Drivge slower than my IDE?

Pressed ENTER by mistake, hence the spelling mistake in the topic title. ^^;

On to business: I just reinstalled my computer on a new SATA Hard Drive I got which is to replace my old IDE one. However, performance with the SATA drive seems slower than with my IDE drive. I've ran numerous Hard Drive tests and S.M.A.R.T analysis showed nothing unusual with the drives health, so what could be causing this? Any help is apprieciated!

What was the old IDE drive, and what is the new SATA drive (hardware-wise)? Also, what mode is that new drive operating in - IDE, AHCI, or RAID? That motherboard in your system specs is an Intel ICH7 chipset, meaning it's not a "full" SATA controller in certain circumstances - it's actually missing some SATA functionality when not in AHCI mode, which would make a SATA drive *very* slow. For example, VMWare ESX supports the use of an ICH7 27c0 controller in an ESX host server, but only for CD-ROM drives - that's pretty telling for a company that prides itself on it's IOPS performance from disk. Basically, what you've got is a pretty slow SATA controller to begin with, and it's even slower when not in AHCI mode.

Thanks for taking the time to offer some help!

Hmm, well how can you change the drive to AHCI mode?

AHCI Enabling after install tutorial

If AHCI is not supported by chipset, theres nothing that registry change can do about.

Correct - the controller must be configured for AHCI mode in the BIOS before that reg key does anything.