I have installed a FreeBSD test installation on part of the disk, and it
seems to suffer the same fate as NetBSD. In systat iostat it also does
not get more than about 60 write xfers/second, and an associated
transfer speed of 4M/sec. So this tends to point to hardware again,
since FreeBSD's AAC driver seems much further developed than NetBSD's.

How that RawIO benchmark managed to get its much better results is still
a mystery to me.

I am more and more thinking in the direction of a partial hardware
failure of the card. Maybe some kind of interrupt that is not coming
through. The card could keep working if another interrupt is generated
that makes it poll the card anyway. Or something like that.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert - rhialto@       -- "What good is a Ring of Power
\X/ polderland.nl            -- if you're unable...to Speak." - Agent Elrond