After a good bit of googling this seems to be a good place for a decent bit of ipod support.
So, "Hello" to everyone here. :)

I've recently dusted off an old Gateway PIII 700 running Windows 2000 professional and upgraded it witha 4port USB2 card (pci) and a faster EIDE interface as the original motherboard only had USB1 and IDE.

I have the ipod on the USB2 card and i've replaced an ancient and slow cd/dvd drive (running off the MB IDE) with a shiny new LG dvd rewriter.

I updated Win2kprof to be as current as possible, uninstalled ipod and iTunes and updated to the latest Itunes 7 and updated the nano firmware to 1.3 and gave the machine a good defrag for good measure. :)

I also checked for new firmware for the DVD rewriter but i'm on the latest version (1.0).

The USB card detects my Epson R300 printer and the nested media card reader as USB2 Hi speed mode and is indeed very speedy at transferring files compared with the MB USB 1 ports (confirming USB 2 operation) .

PROBLEM 1:
The nano is only listed as a bog standard USB device in the device manager and is just as
slow to update on the new USB 2 card as it was on the MB USB1 ports. This is disappointing but I can live with it.

PROBLEM 2:
Import speed of CD's start really slow (1x) and over importing 2-3 average length (4-5min) tunes off a typical CD the import speed crawls up to a peak of around 4.2x. Not good, and about the samebehaviour as I had under nano firmware 1.0 & iTunes 5 that shipped with the nano.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Some info on my setup as follows.

--
Nero Drive speed reports the following.

Drive; HL-DT-STDVD-RAM GSA-H22N;
Firmware; 1.00;
Transfer Rate - Average; 25.85x;
Transfer Rate - Start; 15.83x;
Transfer Rate - End; 33.65x;
Random Seek Time; 103 ms;
1/3 Seek Time; 120 ms;
Full Seek Time; 171 ms;
1 X CPU Usage; 14 %;
2 X CPU Usage; 2 %;
4 X CPU Usage; 31 %;
8 X CPU Usage; 6 %;
Burst rate; 18518 KB/sec;
Spin Up Time; 4.76 sec;
Spin Down Time; 3.10 sec;
Load Time; 1.44 sec;
Eject Time; 4.19 sec;
Recognition Time; 19.43 sec

--
A selection of relevant Drive diagnostics from iTunes 7:

Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 (Build 2195)

iTunes 7.0.2.16
CD Driver 2.0.6.1
CD Driver DLL 2.0.6.1
LowerFilters: cdrbsdrv (7.5.0.0),
UpperFilters: incdrm (4.3.18.0), InCDPass (4.3.18.0), GEARAspiWDM (2.0.6.1),

Found aspi32 running.

IDE\DiskQUANTUM_FIREBALL_CX13.6A________________A3 F.0B00, Bus Type ATA, Bus Address [0,0]
SCSI\CdRomHL-DT-STDVD-RAM_GSA-H22N1.00, Bus Type SCSI, Bus Address [0,0]

D: HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-H22N, Rev 1.00

Audio CD reading succeeded.
Get drive speed succeeded.
The drive CDR speeds are: 8 10 16 40 48.
The drive CDRW speeds are: 8.
The drive DVDR speeds are: 8.
The drive DVDRW speeds are: 8.