Rajagopal Swaminathan wrote:
I powered down the box and changed the SATA mode in BIOS f4rom Auto to Serial ATA. That did the trick
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 0.00 0.00 2.60 0.00 0.00 97.40
and, note its now not only copying the data nearly 100X faster, its 97% idle. I believe your earlier iostat showed like 60% system time or something.