SATA 500GB Maxtor moves data... s l o w l y

if you have other hard drives in this setup, are they experiencing the same thing? If you have other drives, are they also SATA?

No, the Maxtor 500GB SATA/300 is the only hard drive in this system. There is an IDE DVD-Writer.

Is there a link or reference for using SATA drives in a non-RAID setting?

You don't have to do anything for any type of hard drives to make sure they are not running in a RAID setup so that isn't your concern.
I'd update the BIOS and the chipset of your MB if you have not done so.
If you have, you may want to throw another hard drive in there to see if you get the same problem. If you don't have a spare hard drive, you need to run some hard drive tests against your hard drive. The vendor usually has software they use to test their hard drives.

I had the same problem and it drove me nuts! Put the 500G on a different SATA port. I dont use the lone 2 orange ones as they are tied to the IDE drives and will run slow. Try the 2 orange or purple that are side by side. By the way you can only hot swap SATA on the 2 purple.

chk for any bad sector in it ! i m also using the same 500gb sata and it was slow once thn i chk the disck from chkdsk utility and found tht there are bad sectors in it so i replaced the drive as tht was under warranty and now it is fine a newer one same 500gb sata maxtor.