> > I dropped in the ZA snapshot.  It does not help at all with the disk.

Okay, amendment: I was using dd raw-read performance, which still takes up
to 30 seconds to read 10 blocks of 1 MB each.  I tried varying the
block-sizes, though, and got some more interesting results:

For 10MB of data, 1MB at a time, 30 to 45 seconds.
                  512bytes        8
                  1K             14
                  2K             14
                  4K             15
                  8K             15
                  16K            15

(These times are rough.  Performance seems to vary somewhat from
invocation to invocation...)

Interestingly, at 32K, I did two runs...one ran in 12 seconds, the other
ran in 46(!) seconds.  Very bizarre...


(I think that bonnie++ performance has improved, actually.  But its
numbers don't match with my subjective impression, nor with raw disk I/O
numbers.)


> OK, did you try updating the BIOS ?

No.  I've been hesitant to do that.  I suppose that either updating the
BIOS or trying a new motherboard would be the next step.  (BIOS sounds
cheaper, but I need to find a DOS disk somewhere to run the BIOS upgrade
tool...(^&)


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu