SATA HDD problem

[petermarker]

i've 2 hard drives: seagate baracuda 160GB[3 years old] and seagate baracuda 250GB[1.5 years old].
the copying speeds on both these drives have slowed down to 15 MB/secs, especially when i try copying large-semi large files[500MB and above].

the slowdown occurs in both windows xp[32] and windows 7[64] (dual boot).

i've tried changing the physical sata ports for these drives and they are now connected to sata0 and sata 1; 160GB master to sata0 and 250 GB slave to sata1.

i've also tried enabling write caching on the HDDs and disabling windows write cache buffer flushing to further improve speeds in windows 7, but no improvements occured.

Please help.
thanks.

CONFIG: intelcore2duo E7300; intel DG43NB M/B; Kingston 1GB 800Mhz*2; xfx 9500GT 512MB DDR2; VIP 500 watts

[Neuron]

Defragment the drive if it isn't.

[petermarker]

Originally Posted by Neuron

Defragment the drive if it isn't.

all drives already defragged; except one [124GB on 160GB sata hdd]. it has a few image[.nrg] files.45% fragmented.