writes to disk are sluggish, truncated.

I have installed SuSE 7.0 on a dual celeron mobo with standard ide. I am trying to get a large file onto the box and have attempted several things all of which fail. When I ftp to the linux box from the w2k box and do a 'put', about 12M writes, then the the connection times out. When I samba mount the w2k box and do a 'cp' about 12M writes than the cp process hangs until I -KILL it (I've waited up to an hour, it never gets beyond 12M or so). No messages in the log or anything. Am suspecting IDE probs in SMP kernel. Any ideas? Rgds, Marty