On Wed, 4 May 2005, Richard Rauch wrote:
> Your problem sounds a little like something I once had.
> I had noticed, years ago, that my main desktop system was extremely
> slow at disk I/O.  Since it had enough memory to rarely swap and to
> cache most things, I didn't really notice it except on the occasion
> that I rebooted.  (Then, I could watch the little spinning cursor
> slowly spin for kernel load.)

I think I've read your original post while I was searching for others with the 
same problem.

In this case, I don't think it's the over taxed power supply, the Epias are 
made for low power consumtion applications, and the machine has Antec's
350W rack PSU. Besides the motherboard, there's just two HDDs and a floppy 
drive.

> Out of disgust, I went to a local store and bought a Western Digital
> which has worked beuatifully ever since.  I still have the Maxtor
> drive, somewhere.  I had a theory that I could use it for infrequent
> backups, but it was so slow that I never got around to that.  (^&

In my case, the slow machine has two ST340015A's and the fast one ST380011A's.

Here's the specs:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st340015a.html
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st380011a.html

I'd find it very odd, if BOTH of the drives were suffering the same kind of a 
problem, especially when they're about 3 months old. Then again, this is a RAID 
system, so I could replace the drives one by one, but I'd rather look for other 
alternatives first before spending 150e for new hardware that might not fix the 
problem.

-- 
Ari Sovijärvi
http://apz.fi/