Hello again,
  I'm seeing some rampant slowness with a secondary drive on an ATI/AMD
(IXP IDE) based motherboard.  There are two sata drives attached to it,
and the primary one reads & writes fast, but the secondary one refuses
to write any faster than 7MB/s.  It does however, read really fast.
(Again, this is a dedicated hosting machine, so some of my testing
abilities are limited..)

from the dmesg, I see that it reports:
wd1: quirks 2<FORCE_LBA48>
but don't see anything else to indicate a problem.

Any ideas?  Is it possibly just a bad harddrive & I should try to get
it replaced?
Thank you again!
Jonathan

here are some excerpts from my dmesg that are relevant to the situ:

ixpide0 at pci0 dev 18 function 0
ixpide0: ATI Technologies IXP IDE Controller (rev. 0x00)
ixpide0: bus-master DMA support present
ixpide0: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
ixpide0: using irq 5 for native-PCI interrupt
atabus0 at ixpide0 channel 0
ixpide0: secondary channel configured to native-PCI mode
atabus1 at ixpide0 channel 1
atabus2 at ixpide1 channel 0
atabus3 at ixpide1 channel 1
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0: <WDC WD2000JS-00MHB0>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd0: 186 GB, 387621 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 390721968 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd0(ixpide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)
wd1 at atabus1 drive 0: <ST3250620NS>
wd1: quirks 2<FORCE_LBA48>
wd1: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd1: 232 GB, 484521 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 488397168 sectors
wd1: 32-bit data port
wd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd1(ixpide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) (using DMA)