HD to HD transfer issues

I have two SATA HD's. One is a Maxtor SATA 150 300gb hd. The second one is a WD 250gb hd. The WD has a larger cache (16mb compared to 8mb) and is a faster HD overall. Both work just fine except in certain circumstances.

For example if I download a 2gb file (game) to my c drive (maxtor) and install the game to my d drive (wd) the game will be corrupt and fail to work. But if I install the game to my c drive then copy the directory over to my d drive then it will work fine.

Also if I install a game from my dvd drive to my d drive it works fine. The only problem seems to be using installers/zipped files from c to d drive. But if I just do a plain copy it works fine.

I have tried upgrading my SATA windows drivers and it's bios to no avail. This has happened ever since I upgraded my 2nd SATA drive. Originally I had another duplicate Maxtor SATA there and never had any issues, ran that in raid and not in raid for about 1 year, when it died I replaced it with the WD. Is the problem because the 2nd drive is faster? What could be causing the issues? Something funky with my SATA controller?

System Specs:
AMD Athlon XP 3000
2gb DDR 400 Ram
ABIT NF7-S Rev 2 MB
Maxtor 300gb SATA 150 drive
WD 250gb SATA 150drive
Generic DVD burner

Just really stumped at what could be the issue.

The suggested solution seems to be change the EXT-P2P setting in the BIOS from the default 30 microseconds to 1 millisecond. Could be worth a try if yours is set to the faster figure, but they complain performance suffers.

http://www.short-media.com/forum/arc...p/t-37949.html

Thanks, will try that out. If I notice too big of a performance hit will try to find my PCI SATA controller somewhere around here.