I came across this item below, has anyone seen this issue before.

"This is a hardware issue, using a RAID card on the system. Firebird
is affected as soon as i have a RAID SATA or SCSI card installed on
the system (even if i don't use it), while Interbase 7.1 don't..."

http://forums.devshed.com/firebird-sql-development-61/firebird-database-too-slow-315723-2.html