Since the day MHDD 4.6 was released, I never had problems erasing hard drives, which I always do to the target drive before recovering data to it.

The function always erased at a speed of about 50-60MB/sec.

The past couple of days, however, has suddenly seen this speed drop to around 5MB/sec. On every single machine I have, with the original CDs on which the ISO was created, on every single hard drive I have tried. (Over 20.)

Surely there must be some explanation for this? I have numerous virus and malware checkers, and all have come up with negative activity.

Hope someone can shed some light on this.

(Drives set up 2nd master, jumpered as master. Same as it always was..)

Are your drives ( hdd's) are ok?
or not...

Most common problem - broken DMA pin on the HDD... Double-check your cables and drives for any damage. Also some BIOS-es have lots of switches to enable/disable UDMA - you have check that as well...

Yes - hard drives were mainly purchased new stock (Seagate / Maxtor <cough> / Western Digital) and have been working for months.

All cables, pins, connectors have been checked.

The strange thing is, this all started to happen over the course of two days; on the first, only one computer was affected. Then the next day, every single other computer was affected. (Using the original CDs I burnt with MHDD 4.6)

If I erase a drive with a SATA connection, all works fine on all computers.

The suddenness of this all is rather obscure....

I know the exact answer for that problem.

I'm fixing about 10 - 20 hdd's a day.

Always the last part of every repair for me is erase and smart reset.

I know that not all motherboard are able to handle high erase speeds.

For example, maxtor 6Y080LO on
Msi Kt3 Ultra erases with speed about 50 mb/s
on ECS K7VZA about 7 MB
on MSI KT3 Ultra 2 about 5 MB

I have tried a lot of bios configurations, and this is pernament.

Of course to have maximum erase speed drive must be detected by bios, if You will swap and erase hard drives without restarting you computer it will erase it using pio mode that on most mainboard is about 7- 8 MB/s.