Maxtor SATA drive causes system lag issue

I have 2 IDEs and a SATA installed. My OS is on one of the IDEs and the other IDE and the SATA are storage drives.

Recently, my SATA drive has been causing my system to hang for 1 second at 3 second intervals. Mouse and processes both hang. The hang starts when the bootscreen loads and continues into windows. If I disable the drive in device manager, the lag is gone.

Last known thing I did that could have prompted this: I performed a filesearch in windows explorer on files on this drive. The lag began immediately.

Driver Issue? I've been using the same driver for a few months now with no problem.

Ugh, and of all times for this to happen. It's finals week at UT:Austin!!!
Any help is appreciated!

Here's my info from Dr. hardware:

AMD Athlon 64, 1808.3 MHz
Chipset - VIA Apollo K8N800(A)/K8M400 + VT8237 Southbridge via 8x V-Link

Serial ATA-1 Hard Disk - Maxtor 6Y160M0
Product information - Supported/enabled modes
Translation - 16383C/16H/63S (8063MB) | Single/Multi DMA | - / 0 1 2
Capacity/Cache - 149.0 GB / 7936 KB | UDMA/33 | 0/33 1/33 2/33
AAM/APM Setup - 254 (rec.=192) / 0 | UDMA/66-133 | 3/66 4/66 5/100 6/133(a)
Features - SMART(a) Write-Cache(a) Lookahead(a) | S-ATA | 1.5Gb/s: no; 3.0 Gb/s: no