Strange performance problems

[bc7009]

I currently have two hard drives in my setup; a 160gb 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda that I bought a few years ago, and a 1tb WD Caviar Black that I purchased recently. The Seagate is my system drive, and the WD I had hoped to use as a drive for everything else (games, music, files, etc...). Unfortunately, when I play games that are installed on the WD drive, I often get brief hangs or stutters as if the game is trying to load something but can't quite do it fast enough. Games that are installed on my old seagate run almost flawlessly. I ran the hd tune read benchmark for both drives and got the following results: WD Drive - 110.3mb/s (max), Seagate - 79.8mb/s (max). Why am I getting good performance from a 3 year old drive while my newer and (supposedly) faster WD Caviar seems to be unable to keep up?

--Other components--
gigabyte ga-ma770t-ud3p
amd phenom ii x2 550 BE (OC to 3.6Ghz)
4gb crucial ddr3 1333Mhz
sapphire radeon hd 5870
Corsair tx750w psu

 

[sturm]

Are both drive SATA or Pata/IDE drives?
Have you tried a new cable?
Have you tried installing the "problem" game on the Seagate to see how it works?

 

[bc7009]

Both drives are SATA drives. I installed a problem game on the seagate and I significantly fewer hangs during gameplay. The game in question was CoDWaW, chosen simply because it doesn't place as much load on the cpu as many other games that I have, which removes the possibility of cpu bottlenecking causing the problem (cpu loads were generally around 70-80%)