According to Herb Peyerl:
>
>I bought an ABIT with 800Mhz Athlon and 2 45G IBM IDE disks that I 
>intended to raid1 together.

Interesting, I just bought a 800MHz PIII and 1 45G IDE disk.  I copied
about 6Gig or so off my old machine's SCSI disk using dump/restore onto the
new IDE disk without noticable performance problems.

>
>The first problem came when I raid1'd the two partitions together.  Every-
>thing performs admirably except when it comes to extracting something 
>like pkgsrc.tar.gz.  mkdir(2) calls consume 3500 I/O's and take 17 seconds
>to complete, most of the time:
>

Silly question - you _do_ have the IDE disks on separate channels
don't you?  What is your performance like if you split the mirror? (I
know that may not be desirable but it may help to cut out some culprits)

>Changing volumes on pipe input?
>abort? [yn] n

try using the 's' option with dump, I normally do something like:

dump 0sf 1000000 - / | (cd /mnt && restore xf - )

may help just in case dump has gone whacko and is trying to put
everything into QIC150 sized chunks.

-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, BAE SYSTEMS
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