There may be many reasons, but I can think of three possibilities: 1) You have placed the disk drive on the same IDE channel as a CD or DVD drive, and I/O on that channel will only run as fast as the CD/DVD drive, much slower than the HD would go if it was on an HD-only IDE channel. 2) Your disk is not in DMA mode. It may be something you need to set in the BIOS, or you may need to set it on in device properties. 3) Your Athlon motherboard is using a VIA chipset, and you may need to install or re-install the latest VIA "4-in-1" drivers. It may be something else, entirely, too.