Well, I went back and did some more testing with various hdparm settings and finally came up with someothing that provides acceptable performance. System: Dell Precision M50 HD: IBM Travelstar 60GB 5400RPM This hdparm line gives me over 21 MB/sec read performance: hdparm -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 -X66 -B255 /dev/hda The big difference in performance came when I used -B255 to turn off APM features for this drive. I need to do some more research about this option and whether there might be something in the Redhat config that affects performance so dramatically when disk APM features are turned on. Glenn
