Hi SIRCOOKS,
That's a combination of the I/O (Input/Output) bottleneck, in conjunction with the crappy design of Windows OS
It just sucks the performance of the system down to the ground
Unless you have FAST SCSI subsystem hard drives, or a ATA 133 hard drive, then "maybe" the performance won't degrade so much
Edit: If you want more speed, make sure you have DMA enabled, and "write caching" enabled too. Warning
With write caching turned on, if you have a hard crash, you could kiss your file system bye bye
-kwag