I have a 1.5TB Western Digital hard disk (WD15EADS-00R6B0) on my CentOS-5.7 server, which has become incredibly slow for some operations, eg rsync, BackupPC archive, e2fsck, although it seems to work fine for ordinary file operations, and "smartctl -a /dev/sdb" does not report any errors. For example, running "e2fsck -p /dev/sdb5" on a 250GB partition on this disk took over 24 hours to complete, as it did on another partition. I wonder if anyone can offer an explanation, or suggest a remedy? -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin