Guolin Cheng said: > Then that means for normal ia-32 machines, the PCI&IDE Bus speed is > mostly 33MHz/s, and so the sustainable IDE disk access speed is always > no more than about 33MB/s? I tried several types of Linux boxes, the > long-time disk access is about no more than 35MB/s. To very broadly generalize 33MB/s sustainable is a limitation of physically reading the disk, not the interface from the motherboard to the disk. All the ATA66, ATA100, and ATA133 specs are about burst speed (basically reading from the disk's on board cache). Alternatives for faster sustainable speeds would include: faster spinning SCSI disks, RAID, non-mechanical hard drives. -- William Hooper