In my haste for help, I stupidly hit reply and changed the subject which I thought was enough for a new message, not giving much thought for the threading, etc. So apologies for the hijack, although I would think it fairly obvious that it wasn't deliberate or obvious to me... or a big deal really. My mail doesn't thread. Some further info for those actually interested in helping, I forgot that the HD in question had an Ubuntu 8.10 install on it, so I fired that up and hdparm -t produced 56MB/Sec. So the issue is either kernel or config. Thanks for your patience. ----- Forwarded Message ---- I have a system who's normal activity is running Xen 3.3.1 with Centos 5.3 as the DomU. I had reason to connect an IDE drive to the single IDE interface that this board has. I was getting slow performance. hdparm -t revealed that the thoughput was down to just 2.7 MB/sec. After some tweaking (switch on 32 bit,etc) and retesting under a non-Xen config, I managed to get that to 8MB/Sec. When I move the drive to a USB to IDE adapter, hdparm -t gives me about 18MB/Sec. Big improvement, although I don't know if it is then perfect.. My kernel is 2.6.18-128.4.1.el5. I have kernel parameter pci=nomsi. I can't remember exactly why I needed this, but there was a good reason, maybe SATA drive not working properly or some such. Could this be the cause of my issue? The motherboard blurb states that the IDE interface is ATA/133 compliant and I am using the provided IDE cable. I have tried three hard disks, all with similar results. (2x 40gb + 1x 160gb) lspci | grep IDE gives 00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] IDE (rev a1) As a reference, hdparm -t against the SATA drive in AHCI mode on the same board gives about 110MB/Sec. Any ideas, anyone? Thanks in advance, Ian. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090810/c8860b8b/attachment-0005.html>