Is this a "feeling"? or have you benchmarked your drive? Use HDTACH to bench.

My guess is that it is on a FAT32 partition instead of NTFS. W2k will work better using it's native file system.

yes its a fact that FAT32 is slower than NTFS5. So convert the drive to NTFS and it should be faster

In some things, Fat32 are fster, other things, NTFS faster. For eksample, moving a lot of small files from one HD to another, using FAT32 is faster. But defragmenting a 8GB FAt32 HD is very slow compared to the same NTFS 8GB HD, probably three times as fast.
 
But access like that, might be because of the way win2k performs Winamp's requests. For instance, Opera 4.0 hangs my computer for a while (3-5 secs) every now and then, but in winme and whistler it never does that.
 
I dont know this for sure though, it can either be the driver and OS too get a HD benchmarking and check what things is slower like DOSFeak said!

OK,
 
first thanks all for your replies. This in fact was due to the FAT32 file system as I tried transfering files to an NTFS partition and it proves to be much faster. The problem is I access those files from W98 or W2k so they must stay on the FAT32 partition.
I'll just be patient and this will do, unless someone has a magic patch to have W98 recognise NTFS ??!!
 
Thanks again all.

There is a [non-free, which means there is probably a free version] program that will allow DOS to recognize NTFS. I'm looking for it, but haven't found it yet [too many bookmarks]. I'll get back here when I do find it.
 
-bZj