My dell8200 laptop has often given me problems with disk I/O speed in both KDE and Gnome when their cd-cgecking deamon was active. Thus a command like hdparm -t /dev/hda would give me terribly erratic results (1-7 MB/sec) if there was no CD in the tray. Once mounted, things were better, or normal. I'd get more like 17-22 MB/s, depending on the disk of course. At least in rh7 and rh9 i knew how to solve it (they were filed in bugzilla). I'm sadly returning to this problem with FC3. This time the problem is even present outside of X. I returned to runlevel 3, but even there i can terrible I/O. One side-effect of bad disk I/O is that the "startx" command will take forever to load, and don't even try something like openoffice :-) So, first of all, i'm looking for soulmates who can confirm that a dell8200, or any other laptop with hda and hdb populated have the same problem, and then see how this can be solved. As it stands now, i cannot use FC3. I don't know if the problem should occur with two drives on hda and hdb, since once the CD is either inserted or mounted, the problem appears to go away. I should also add i've been running FC3 just fine on a desktop, with IDE (a+c) software raid and a SATA disk. - peter
