Well, I had some more time to poke at this problem, and went to the Maxtor
site to see if there were any drive-specific hints that might explain my
situation.  I was unable to readily find an exact match for the drive
model, but a similar drive is under warranty until sometime in 2003.  I
was surprised at that, but took it as a good indication that maybe *my*
drive is still under warranty.  (It is, it turns out.)

After some exchange with their tech. support (who had a hard time coming
to grips with the concept that ``I don't have MS-WINDOWS'' is a real
fact), they issued me an RMA.  Taking the ``advanced'' RMA option, I had
them send out a new drive before I return the old one.  (Normally, they
want the old drive back, first---but *I* wanted to be able to continue
using my system.  (^&)

The new drive arrived today, and seems to have fixed my problems.  Due to
*extremely* poor performance of the old drive, I didn't make a
block-by-block copy of the disk, so I can't 100% rule out the possibility
that the filesystem layout was degenerate.  (But, I'm pretty sure.  / and
/usr both suffered; raw dd reads from /dev/wd0? suffered; my (almost
untouched) GNU/LINUX partition suffered...)


The new disk performs in bonnie++ as follows:

Version  1.01       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
hermes         300M 10718  24 10369   6  5119   3 24210  76 26282  11  83.2   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16   367  38 +++++ +++  1937  19   514  53   953  99  1093  41
hermes,300M,10718,24,10369,6,5119,3,24210,76,26282,11,83.2,0,16,367,38,+++++,+++,1937,19,514,53,953,99,1093,41

I thought that the seeks should be better than that, but my (completely
different disk/controller/etc.) Gateway2000 machine gets about 70
seeks/sec, so maybe the seeks aren't so bad.  It's certainly 10 times what
I was getting.  (Note that the files are 300MB, so that may affect
seeks...)

Subjectively, the drive is *much* nicer than the old one.  X starts up in
a couple of seconds, isntead of taking a minute, for example.


I don't know if I'll keep the Maxtor controller or not.  It lets my drive
do UDMA 5, I think (the VIA motherboard controller only supports UDMA 2),
but I'm not sure how much real-world differnce that makes.  It feels a
little faster on the Maxtor controller, but not vastly better.


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