On the topic of writes starving reads in 2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp #1 SMP. It really *does* lock the box up, for all practical purposes. It's not really locked, but any normal user would conclude that the system was frozen up. Interestingly enough, I cannot reproduce the writes starving reads problem on my desktop Ubuntu Dapper box running "2.6.15-26-k7 #1 SMP PREEMPT". This is a UP box without RAID, but with LVM2. It's an AMD64 4000+, running 32 bit. The main differences I see are: UP vs SMP No RAID Different kernel version Preempt Ubuntu uses Anticipatory scheduler whereas Centos uses CFQ. My understanding is that CFQ is supposed to be *better* than Anticipatory for this kind of thing. Vanilla is moving to CFQ in 2.6.18 I believe. Also, the next release of Ubuntu is moving to CFQ. I tried moving the CentOS kernel over to my Ubuntu box for testing, but it is having problems finding the volume groups. So, does Linux software Raid1 just suck? Or CFQ? Or something else? CentOS's behavior under heavy writes on this box is bad enough to be considered a serious bug in my opinion. Thanks, Steve