>
>  Heres the situation
>  K6-2/300MHz, 64MB RAM, NetBSD 1.5.1., 2 physical drives both with
> softdeps
>
>  While trying to untar pkgsrc.tgz on a un-loaded system (about 20megs of
> RAM used, no swap space used) it's abysmall slow. Disk writes top out at
> about 200KB/second. I did not notice this when the same box was running

it is unfortunately normal.

>  These same tar files untar fast on another box.

smaller drive with larger cpg and more cache?