Silicon Image 3112 SATA and my Maxtor 250GB SATA == SLOOOOW!

I've had an Abit AN7 mobo (Ultra 400 ver.) for some time now and have never really taken advantage of the SiliconImage 3112 SATA/RAID controller on it (never even installed the driver for it).

Then when looking for a larger HD recently, I stumbled upon a pretty compelling rebate at CompUSA for a Maxtor 250GB SATA drive... Bought it, installed the HD, installed the SATA driver on my system (WinXP SP1), and was looking forward to a nice upgrade in size (as well as an added bonus upgrade in data transfer speeds via the SATA).

In short, the transfer speeds are abysmally slow, much slower than my ATA drives. This is both for data copied from within the SATA drive or when copied to one of my ATA drives... and I'm not sure what I can do about it.

I'm assuming that it's not the drive but is instead the driver to the SATA controller. Has anyone heard anything about less than stellar performance with the SiliconImage 3112 SATA controller on these lines of nForce2 mobos (like my Abit AN7)?

TomsHardware's review of the SilconImage 3112 chipset was favorable back in 2003, so I'm wondering what the cuprit would be (the drive, the SATA controller, WinXP SP1, etc.)

Any advice? Should I just go buy a SATA PCI card instead?

JFC, let us know what you find out. I'm curious if there is backward compatiability. I have an older MB as well but would rather buy a SATA2 drive so it works best with my new system at some point.

There is another possible issue. it is TCQ vs. Command cueing., the 3112 was optimised to work with the WD 36 and 74 raptors and TCQ. Many of the newer drives includung the WD150 raptor use command cueing so the trzansfer rates get bogged. This is another problem caused by JEDEC not getting standard sout timely due to infighting amoung the members