I have a BX-133 RAID mother board containing the Highpoint's HTP370 ATA-100 RAID controller. There is 256Mb RAM and the processor works at 700MHz.

From scratch I installed SuSE 8.0 on the system where 1 MAXTOR drive is connected to ide3 (/dev/hde), 1 MAXTOR to ide4 (/dev/hdg) and 1 IBM to ide4 (/dev/hdh). All are ATA/100 discs. All have at least a few Gb free space on each of them.

File copy performance to and from the IBM at /dev/hdh is awfully slow: it starts with a few Megabytes per second and quickly drops to something less than 1 Mb/s. Unusable if you want to copy a video production directory of 35 Gb. If I look at the processes with "top" then the CPU-usage of kdeinit (or cp, depending how you start the file copy) rises to more then 80%. The data transfer between /dev/hde and /dev/hdg is better, but here too I witness a drop in performance: starting with 15Mb/s and gradually settling to some 5 Mb/s. Haven't checked CPU-usage here. I have the impression that performance is especially worse when dealing with large files ( > 1 Gb). When doing the file copy (by the way: it is all between FAT32 partitions) with Windows98 things go much quicker and an average of 5Mb/s is reached when copying to or from the IBM. But still 5Mb/s is not impressive, is it? Having used "hdparm -v" I know that even the slowest of the HD's can attain 27Mb/s sustained transfer rate. Has anyone experienced this too? Ed Vaessen Disclaimer ************************************************************************ Aan dit bericht kunnen geen rechten worden ontleend. Dit bericht is uitsluitend bestemd voor de geadresseerde. Als u dit bericht per abuis hebt ontvangen, wordt u verzocht het te vernietigen en de afzender te informeren. Wij adviseren u om bij twijfel over de juistheid of de volledigheid van de mail contact met afzender op te nemen. ************************************************************************