OK folks, here's my problem. I bought a used Maxtor 93073U6 30 GB hard drive from a guy at work. Installed it in a computer and tried to format it. The format took almost 48 hours!!! Here is a list of components in the computer.
Motherboard -- Asus P4C800 E
CPU Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz
Memory 2 Sticks 1 Hynix 512 MB HYMD564646CP8J-D43 AA
1 Samsung 128 MB (not sure of model.)
Hard drive - Maxtor 93073U6 30 GB 5400 rpm
Operating System - Windows 2000 Professional
CD ROM - 40x (not sure of brand.)
AMI BIOS ver 1023 (I think this is the latest version from Asus)
BIOS settings for hard drive were set to Auto
Tried setting PIO to 0 which did not help.

I know that memory sticks do not match so will run at single speed. But I removed Maxtor and replaced it with Wester Digital 7200 rpm 20 GB and formatted it in about 10 minutes. I also put the Maxtor drive in my main system which has same motherboard but a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor and matching sticks of Kingston memory totalling 1 GB. That machine is running Windows XP Pro. Started the format on the Maxtor over 2 hours ago and it's at 10 percent. BTW before I started the format on my main system I ran Power Max diagnostics on the drive and it passed. I also did a low level format using the latest version of Power Max. Is a 5400 rpm drive that much slower than a 7200 or what? Any ideas on what's wrong? If you need any other info please let me know and I will supply it. I am at a loss as to what to try next! Thanks in advance for any help.

The computer seems fine, especially if it was running optimally before hand. By mixing the different speeds of drives can be an issue. 5400RPM is 5400 revolutions/minute which is how fast it can access data or move the arm to a new file, which is considerably slower than the 7200RPM of your current drive.
If it is old enough to be at 5400RPM it is also (without getting technical) more inefficient, there have been great improvements to harddrives in the last few years. One way to see the laps in your new drive, if you have the recycling turned on for both drives, empty it..... you still with us? That little pause is your computer stalling to wait for the slower drive. If there is that much pause on a simple operation, that will explain the slowdown in a format.

Ex:
my old 20GB 5400RPM took ~24hrs to format or a little longer
where as i can do my 160GB 7200RPM in a hour or less.

*basically you got a bad deal and it just is slow.
hopefully you didn't pay much for it.

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</Dream In Code>
-William. § (marvin_gohan)

Wel, I knew this drive would be slower but I didn"t think it would be THAT much slower! I checked the specs on my WD 20 GB and it's an ATA/100 compared to the Maxtors ATA/66. At least the guy I bought it from said he would refund my money if I couldn't get it to run any faster. I'll do that and see what I can find on Ebay. Or if anyone knows of a good place to get reliable used hard drives please let me know. I like to try different setups and have 4 systems running right now. Well, the one with the Maxtor I guess would be crawling instead of running. Thanks for the response.

I don't know about used harddrives,
where abouts do you live (country will do), most of the good deals i know are from canadian sites... lol

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</Dream In Code>
-William. § (marvin_gohan)

I live in the USA. Midwest. Not too many ads in the local paper here. I do keep an I on ebay and have gotten some good deals there. I guess I shouldn't be so tight since prices have come way down on hard drives lately. But for my purposes, (testing different setups), I don't need a 200+ gig drive.

as a general rule i try to aim for less than 50 cents per GB including shipping, and any taxes. If you can manage that for an IDE drive it's a decent deal.

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</Dream In Code>
-William. § (marvin_gohan)