M17x R3, slow access to 2nd hard drive

I have had my m17x for about a month now and love it. I bought it with the 250gig ssd main drive and no 2nd hard drive. I then installed a 750gig 7200rpm 2nd drive and it works fine. But, it seems that accessing the 2nd drive is slow sometimes. Actual transfer speeds are not bad but for example, when I am opening pictures from it, there is a delay of a second or 2 that I have not experienced before. I know that the ssd will be faster in this regards but I am comparing the delay to other, non-ssd computers that I have. Also, it is currently set to raid in the bios, but I am not using the drives in raid. I called Alienware support and they told me to simply disable raid in the bios. So I changed it from raid to AHCI and it BSOD at boot. So, I changed it back to raid and it is working again but I still would like to find the cause of the slow 2nd drive access.

Thanks for any info.

PS: I also get the "waiting for program to close" windows when shutting down. It usually only stays up a second or 2 and then shuts down. I am guessing this is because the system is closing down processes pretty fast and is waiting for apps to catch up?