Slow CD and DVD performance on Asus P5WD2 955x - Please Help

Hi,
I'm having a problem with my new setup. It's an Asus P5wd2 Premium with a PentiumD SATA hard drive, lite on DVD-rw running Windows 2000 sp4 with all updates.

The problem is that whenever I go to read a CD or DVD either to copy files or make a backup copy, the drive reads slow (<12xCD or <4xDVD) and one of the cores is about 95%-100% useage (the other core is usually <5% useage). The drive is connected to the blue ICH7R IDE by itself as the master drive.

I have tried everything I can think of including:
-Updating the bios to the latest version
-Updating the drivers to the latest version
-Updating the ASPI layer to the latest version provided by adaptec.

This problem occurs on two other drives including an NEC DVD-RW and an older Liteon CD-RW.

Please help me with this problem. Thanks.