Slow Hard Drive WTF

Factual Questions
1

Okay, I have 3 PCs on my desk at work.
Two get used for virtual PCs, the third runs Office/etc.
The one on the left is a Dell GX280 with a 3 GHZ PIV, XP and 2 GB of RAM. It’s got an ST340014AS drive.

I consistently get right about 1.5 MB per second on writes to this disk.
I notice that “Enable write caching” is turned off for this disk.
Should this really bring the disk down from 25 MB+ per second to 1.5-ish MB per second?

2

It hasn’t dropped into PIO mode, has it?
http://winhlp.com/node/10

3

Have you done any scans for bad sectors?

4

Cugel’s suggestion for the win.
The vbs on the linked page fixed what ailed me.
I’m getting 20+ MB/sec now.

PS- It appears all sectors were just fine.

5

Get the latest BIOS update for your hardware. I had this problem with an HP laptop and it would occasionally rear its head until they updated the BIOS.