GA-EP45T-UD3P and Samsung SATA freezing on access, help!!!

Relevent info:
E8500 CPU, GTX280 vid, 2 existing IDE drives, adding a Samsung SATA.
Latest Gigabyte BIOS and drivers.
Plug in SATA drive, POST looks fine, all drives detected.
Boot into Windows XP fine.
Partition SATA works fine.
Formatting the drive causes the system to start slowing and then hard locks.
Reboot, drive looks OK, mounts and has letter, copy files and it grinds to a stop and locks.
System sometimes comes back alive after a few minutes, sometimes reboots.

I've tried various BIOS settings all with the same results (Enable Raid, ahci,etc)

I've exchanged the HDD thinking it had a bad platter, same thing with new drive.

I've tried booting into safe mode, in case something was interfering, same problem.

Currently the SATA is plugged into the 5th port on the IBM SATA controller, does that make a difference which port I plug into with a single drive?

I'm running XP SP3, just purchased the new Mobo, CPU, RAM, Video, etc and am running an old XP install but have flushed drivers and everything else is solid.

Any ideas?

 

Unreal, I figured it out. I've not used SATA much in the past so I made a n00b mistake.

Apparently if you plug into any other port than SATA0 with your single device it will detect in the BIOS just fine, you can mount the volume just fine, you can even copy a few files OK before it locks, but if you plug into slot 0 everything works perfectly. I didn't use my slot 0 because it is too close to my GTX280 video card (very wide card) and since it detected in the BIOS and in Windows I figured it was fine.

Just an FYI