Internal SATA to SATA transfer speeds at 20Mb/sec... Please Help!

Hey Guys - First time poster here at toms.

I have a serious Issue with my transfer speed between sata drives and was hoping you could all give me some good places to look for my issue... I was gettign between 16 and 20/MB Sec according to the transfer dialog in Vista this morning while sending about 40 gigs at once with an average file size of around 400-600 megs...

COMPUTER:: (no overclocking on cpus or gpus enabled)

AMD Phenom 9950 (2.6 quad)
8GB G-Skill DDR2 800
Vista 64
Crossfire'd Saphire radeon 4850s (nice ones)
2 WDCaviar 500 GB 16mb cache 7200rpm (siSoft sandra shows them reading good and fast)
BIOSTAR TFORCE TA790GX - MOBO
Cooler master 650w power

Any suggestions or help would be extremely appreciated.

Other issues with the system you may want to know about since I built it a couple months ago are that the graphics adapters don't seem to be performing as well as they should playing Farcry 2 and other games at 1920x.... Weird color filling issues, frame-rate issues, etc.

This was just file data, OS running, moving video files to 2nd HDD to make room in program files dir... all internal drives..

So you're saying that's not bad then..? How not bad - should I be concerned at all? I just thought that 40gigs in moderate file sizes with 7200 rps drives would have been faster and Vista showing 16-20/MB sec was very concerning...
I know that windows confuses the heck out of itself when dealing with large file transfers as far as what the drives are actually doing, and what it shows in the transfer dialog...

while it may be normal, 20MB/s seems a tad sluggish... Have you installed the latest drivers? more specifically, the latest chipset drivers? on AMD's website, its a pain to navigate but find the chipset section, get the unified driver, and then get the southbridge driver. Maybe that will help.

Byproduct if this would be updated video card drivers too which may fix the weird things you're experiencing in games.

Video card drivers I know are up to date, mobo I did update when installed not long ago, processor not yet, HDD not that I can recall.. Thanks.

Any known compatibility issues with crossfiring 4850 gddr3 512s with phenom on an 8gig 64bit system?

after doing some math... 20mb a sec is pretty slow, thats about how fast my machine transfers USB. (USB for me = 48 gigs in about 45mins, I did this just yesterday transferrring music)

I've noticed a problem similar to this as well. I have three WD 160GB drive in RAID5, and I just got a 500GB Seagate for storage. If I transfer something over the network (gigabit) from one of my roomates comps, I average about 40 to 60MBs according to vista, but transfering from my array to the Seagate, it starts at 70MBs and quickly drops to around 12MBs. That just doesn't seem right.

Just in case, here are the specs:

C2E QX6850 @ 3.5GHz
4GB ram
Vista x64
EVGA 680i Sli board

i too have noticed slow HDD speeds , i have 2 ea WD 250 sata 2 HDD. they say speeds of up to 300MB/s but according to HD Tune i am only getting a max of 63MB/s and a burst speed of 128MB/s, the mobo is a MSI K9A Platinum with an AMD SB600 sata controller capable of 300MB/s , so i am at a loss as to why such slow speeds? all drivers are installed for the mobo , checked with WD no jumpers mean full speed and there are none on HDD's they are close to full but the speeds were the same even when empty and i defrag at least once every 2 weeks or upon uninstall or reinstall of anything. so i am at a loss on this issue also checked the bios settings and all seem to be set to auto so ??? any help would be nice thx

so im guessing that they mean the total transfer speed the sata controller will handle is 300MB/s, ie 3 or 4 HDD's @say 60 MB/s would be a total of 240MB/s with 4 drive's ? kind of like a USB host controller, it only allocates a said amount of bandwidth for each port but the total is a lot higher? any way thank's for your help and i am watching prices for those SSD's will be able to afford them soon. just waiting for the less then a buck a GIG rule for 250GB and above drives, getting close. i remember when just 2 years ago a 32GB SSD was almost $2,000 ! lol now i think you can get a 32 GB SSD for around $150 or less.

well thank you 4 your feedback. i am still kind of bumed , the HDD box says 300 MB/s and the mobo is 300MB/s and i get 130MB/s burst and about 63MB/s average......... o well. i think 4 now i will try a few 150 GB WD raptors in raid 0+1 and see what i get. with my system im waiting on my HDD's all the time. thanks again 4 your help
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Specs.

AMD X2 6000+ Dual Core @ 3.2Ghz
MSI K9A Platinum AM2 / AMD 580X NB and AMD SB600
4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800/6400 D/C
Visiontek ATI HD 4870 512 MB GDDR5 @750/1005
On Board Realtek HD 7.1 sound
2Ea. WD SATA2 250GB 7200/16MB HDD's 1Ea. 750GB Maxtor USB 1Ea. 350GB Seagate ATA.
Win XP Pro SP3.