WD 250 sata2 very slow seek time

[sagaticus]

I bought this drive for my new PC. It's a WD 250GB 7200 WD2500JS SATA2. When I click on a folder in explorer sometimes it can take upwards of 20 seconds to load the contents of the folder. It does this randomly and frequently if there is 20mb in the folder or if there is 3gb in there.

It's also partitioned and it's NTFS. I never saw this with one of my IDE WD drives.

Is it getting too hot? The MB is at 27C and the cpu is 31C.
Is there free SMART software that can help diagnose this?

 

[sturm]

Did you load in the motherboard drivers after installing the os. Windows drivers arent always the best.
Have you checked the hardware manager to make sure that the dma is set right. Not sure if sata has that option though.
Cables good? no sharp bends or kinks? Try a new cable if you can.