Abstract: The present invention provides a hard drive accelerating system (32) that substantially improves the hard disk data transfer speed in a computer. The accelerating system decomposes a traditional CPU IO command to read or write a hard disk drive (18) into two separate tasks that can be executed concurrently. A read buffer (40) and a write buffer (42) are used to link the two tasks. A state machine (48) generates consecutive IO read cycles to fetch data from the hard drive to the read buffer while the CPU executes IO commands to retrieve data from the read buffer. A programmable hardware register (49) adjusts the hard disk IO cycle time to achieve maximum compatibility with different hard drive speeds.