karendar

Is your BIOS configured to take the 133 mhz FSB of the Athlon XP 2100+? Is your processor overheating? How about BIOS settings like AGP fast writes, your Aperture size set to 128 or 256? How about your drivers? Are your AGP GART drivers installed? (Chipset drivers for motherboards usually auto install those, VIA 4 in 1's and the such.) and the latest GeForce 4 drivers? Like the 41.09 detonators? There are many reasons for a slowdown, you should look into each one of these.

Sounds like either a driver issue or your HD dying out, to be honest. Update your video card drivers, your motherboard drivers, your sound drivers, etc. and try again.

To be perfectly honest, I see no apparent difference between 16 bit and 32 bit

Are the drives identical? My guess would be yes, but there's no mentions of it there... Like it was stated, check for a firmware update on the RAID controller, that fixed my problems. Also, if those drives are WD drives, get a copy of the dlgdiag tool on western digital's site to scan the HDs to make sure their SMART table and structures are ok. RAID dislikes defective drives. Make sure your stripped bit isn't too high also (RAID controller tools on bootup, default is usually the sweet spot) HDTach usually tests RAID well too, try running it to see if you hit the 80/100 meg/sec (If you are in RAID0, of course)

Forgive me for sounding dense, but how about just ghosting it?