I'm working on a project that has a several year old Dell PowerEdge server. It has dual Pentium Pro 200 processors and a total of 256MB of main memory. It also has four 8.5 GB disk drives hooked up to a Power Edge Raid Controller (PERC) - I think it is the oldest model made. The controller provides hardware Raid 0,1, and 5, and I have three of the drives as a logical volume on a Raid 5 array. The problem is that hdparm reports the most awful read times, on the order of 5.5MB/sec. I've done google searches and found other folks reporting similar transfer times, but I have to believe that the controller can do better. 1) Anyone have experience tweaking these controllers? 2) Any ideas from other controllers that might be helpful? I have the controller set to use ReadAhead and Write-Through modes. 3) New hardware is not likely an option. This box was donated to an organization that is not flush with cash. 4) I was considering starting over, but using RAID 1 instead. I have a gut feel that this will be substantially faster. 5) Dell support is not helpful. -- Jim Kaufman mailto:jmk at linuxforbusiness.net Linux Evangelist cell: 612-481-9778 public key 0x6D802619 fax: 952-937-9832 --- Many are called, few volunteer.