correction: (4300mb of data transferring at a rate about 10 mb/second).  I meant 10mb/min... then slows down to around 8mb/min... taking hours! to complete.

So, compared to what should be normal expected behavior for Ghost transfer rate from 1 ide hdd to 2nd ide hdd on local machine.... this appears to be a local machine performance issue as opposed to expected behavior for Ghost.  Any ideas as to why transfer rate is so slow?  Almost as if it is a local disk caching issue, sort-of like when smartdrv.exe is not loaded.  Thanks.

Thanks for your help.  Went to Symantec site per your suggestion and they said:
"Try running Ghost with the following switches:

ghostpe.exe -fna -fnu

The -fna switch turns off Ghost ability to read from the source and
write to the destination at the same time. So Ghost reads and then
writes. The -fnu switch tells Ghost not to read through UDMA and
instead will read through PIO.

That greatly improved performance.  Ghost copied ~5gb at 85mb/min taking about 45 min. to complete.  Not sure if that is 'all that fast' for ide to ide but it worked for me!  Knowing I have an image to back-up from is great piece of mind.

Thank you for your suggestions!