Speed up IDE hard drive access

the short answer is not really, however depending on your exact situation, you might do something with a ramdrive to speed things up (do your actual work on the ram drive, then have it mirror to and from a HD at some reasonable interval.... (remember though.. if this is mission critical data, that in a power fail situation, all will be lost.... since the last mirroring.)

While Amber Haze is correct there are still a few things you can do to improve the current situation.

You can move all your Data into a single Folder on a Different HDD/Partition to the rest of the OS and Programs depending on how your computer is setup. You should frequently run the Defrag option as well to keep the data sequential and allow faster opening of it.

Once you need to go any further it starts to cost money and depending on your current drives they may need to be replaced with faster units running off a PCI Card. This could start with a PCI SATA controller Card to a Fast SCSI Card with the Ultra Fast SCSI HDD's but these are anything but cheap.

Col

It's a good ideea to have a partition for o.s. only. Make a cache for hdd access.
If use 2 hdd with different ATA speed on the same ribbon then you have the lower speed when you work with both.
Have you got motherboard with RAID 0 function?
This function help you to increase data access speed.

Make sure that the IDE channels are running DMA and not PIO if the drive supports DMA (most do these days) Do this in Device manager.