>>>>>> [mount -o async]
> Would you recommend async for disks like a news spool?  Is it functional
> under 1.2?  With ccd?

Hmm.  Oddly enough, it turns out that I had the partition in question (as
well as /var/spool and /var/spool/news) mounted as _synchronous_, which
probably explains the particularly poor extraction speed.

However, I think I recall doing this because of some panics long ago (I
forget whether they were disk corruption panics or synchronization failure
panics, but they were definitely filesystem related).  If people are now
so bold as to mount news partitions *asynchronous*, I can probably change
this now ;-).