Situation: two similar servers, both with CentOS 5.4 64-bit. Making an ext3 filesystem on one takes seconds, on the other minutes. Partition Size Server 1 Server 2 1 GB 0.7 sec 0.3 sec 4 GB 2.5 sec 1.2 sec 40 GB 15 sec 13 min WTF e2fsprogs RPM is e2fsprogs-1.39-23.el5 on both systems mkfs --version reports "util-linux 2.13-pre7" on both systems mkfs -V reports the same on both systems (mke2fs 1.3 (29-May-2006) Using EXT2FS Library version 1.39) file size on mkfs and mkfs.ext3 binaries is identical However, checksum on these binaries differs across servers, and "cmp" reports files are different I took "mkfs" and "mkfs.ext3" from server 1, put them on server 2, and got an improvement: 40 GB 15 sec 3 min Just out of curiousity, I ran "rpm -V e2fsprogs" to see if rpm would pick up the difference and sure enough, it complained mkfs.ext3 changed. Both of these servers have CentOS 5.4; Server 1 was installed in Dec 2009, Server 2 in April 2010. I'd like to: (a) account for the difference in the binaries, and (b) see if something else is different that I can make the same to get the mkfs.ext3 time down to 15 sec on both systems. Solving (a) should shed light on (b). Any ideas? Best, Aleksey