every other day I do full backups to both a second internal disk and an external usb disk. I am using a fully up to date centos 5.1 AMD 64 X2 6400+ machine. with SATA disks. using an NVIDIA chipset, when I do a full rsync the responsiveness of my machine suffers. Slow on the internal disk and really slow on external usb. doing "top" shows 0% idle but only 17% CPU usage by the rsync command. I am stunned that a 6400+ machine dual core can get this sluggish when doing a copy to disk. Is there something I potentially have not set right? dmesg shows my SATA disks at UDMA133 and 1.5 Gbps. THanks, Jerry