It seems like this could just be a hardware problem, and I don't 
remember if you've tried figuring that out yet.  Perhaps switching the 
two drives' place in the IDE chain(s) (assuming that they're IDE drives) 
would give you a clue.  Do you have another machine you could try the 
newer disk in?

Nathan


Lubos Vrbka wrote:

>
>> You might try using even larger blocks, like 32k, or playing with the
>> parameters to "tunefs(8)". 
>
> i tried even 64k blocks, but it didn't help much, in fact the 
> situation was slightly worse than for 32k blocks...
>
>> It might not be a bad idea to go ahead and
>> build a file system on the new disk using a 1.6.2 floppy, just to rule
>> out the hardware completely. 
>
> i did - with 16k blocks the 'cpg' value was something like 368, but 
> the disk was slow anyway... the same with 8k blocks and cpg 86 (that's 
> the same value as for the faster drive) - so should i blame hardware? 
> but why would be raw writing to /dev/rwd1 fast if the drive wouldn't 
> be ok?
>
> i tried with dkctl again and it reports write cache enabled. however, 
> i think there's something wrong here. i can see that reading is fast, 
> but for writing it seems to fill the buffer and waiting 3seconds (i 
> guess the buffer has size of approx. 16mb, since the "chokes" are 
> present each 8% of the testing 200mb large file)
>
> is there any program to properly test what's going on?
>
> thanks,
>