Sound crackling problem related to hard drive??

Hi there.



I have had this problem for sometime now so I'm really hoping one of you can help me sort it out.



Anyway here goes...



I have an Athlon XP 3200, with Windows XP. I have two hard drives. One set as my primary drive which windows and all other programs are installed on. The second drive is set as my slave drive and has all my music stored on it.



Problem is when I play music in programs such as Itunes, I get regular crackling noises every few seconds or so. The larger the file is, the worse the crackling (a wav file is unlistenable). If I am doing something else while playing a track such as burning a cd in Nero, the crackling becomes constant.



I have tried putting a few tunes on my primary hard drive and I'm 95% sure that the crackling problem disappears so it seems to be some sort of problem transferring the sound information from the slave drive to the primary drive. The fact that it gets worse with large files would suggest this is the case.



Has anyone got any idea why this is happening and what can be done about it. The secondary drive is an IDE drive as is the primary drive.



My soundcard is the Echo Audiofire4 and all driver are up to date.



Thanks for reading



PLEASE HELP!!!

have you tried putting a audio cd into your dc drive and play that one, what happens then?

Yes, tried that, no crackling whatsoever...