Craig White wrote:
great thanks - am I right in thinking that having both mirrored drives on the same controller master/slave is likely a cause of slowness?
It will make some difference on writes, but reads should only be done on one of the drives anyway. I doubt if it makes a huge difference unless you have an application writing all the time.
here's my problem - system was ok and mother board died. Purchased a new motherboard and this is what I get...
# hdparm -t /dev/md1
/dev/md1: Timing buffered disk reads: 4 MB in 3.68 seconds = 1.09 MB/sec
which is dreadfully slow
That's worse than slow. Something is broken. Do the drives perform better if you test /dev/hda or /dev/hdb? What does dmesg say about them - does it mention UDMA(100) or better? Are you using a new-style 80-wire cable? It might be worth buying an IDE controller card if the on-board one won't do better than that.