Abit/Silicon Image SATA Stutter?

Hey, I've got a problem that it seems almost everyone has when using a SATA HD with a motherboard using the Silicon Image 3112 SATA controller(onboard, I personally have the Abit NF7-S).

Here's just one of several posts of it in the abit forum:
http://forum.abit-usa.com/showthre [...] genumber=1

The problem is specifically this: Users of Silicon Image 3112 and SATA HD experience reoccuring "lag spikes" and "Hard drive stutters" in single player applications like games, and other intensive graphical applications. But it doesn't only affect graphical applications, for instance winamp takes up to a 1.5 minutes to load a playlist of 200 songs when it should take a mere few seconds. Almost any application using the Hard Drive for (at least) reading information seems to be affected. Who else is experiencing this? Anybody know a way to fix it?

Here is a list of components in my computer to show that this isn't a hardware issue:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
ATI Radeon 9800PRO (at XT speeds)
Maxtor 160GB SATA 8MB/buffer
Enermax 460watt PSU
Abit NF7-S v2.0 (Nforce2 chipset)
1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 Ram
Windows XP Pro SP1

Here are the steps taken by me and others so far to try and alleviate the problem ourselves:
1. Format and fresh windows install
2. Disabling all background applications
3. Defragmenting
4. Running scandisk and disk checking
utilities/checking disk integrity
5. Installing latest Bios
6. Installing ALL latest drivers (motherboard,
silimage, video...anything that could be found)
7. Increasing core voltage
8. Increasing AGP voltage, frequency
9. Increasing chipset voltage, DRAM voltage
10. Manually setting or disabling swap space settings
11. Checking cooling (mine alone reports 25C for
chipset after about 7 hours 100% load...well within specifications)
12. Enabling PCI enhance features
13. Various bios setting alterations like changing IRQs to make sure nothing conflicts
14. Manually setting SATA/SCSI options for the HD(disable synchronous transfers, etc.)
15. Installing all windows patches


Any thoughts on how to fix this would be most welcome. I've been living with a fairly high-end system that's crippled by these stutters/"lag spikes".

*bump*