Hi all, I just recently installed FC3 RC3 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop and experienced _really_ wierd hard-drive performance (IDE drive). At first I noticed it when trying to start applications such as Evolution, FireFox, OpenOffice etc. but then I started testing it with hdparm -t : # hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 38 MB in 5.65 seconds = 6.72 MB/sec # hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 14 MB in 4.38 seconds = 3.20 MB/sec # hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 2 MB in 3.48 seconds = 588.26 kB/sec First I was thinking PIO vs. DMA, but DMA was turned on (confirmed with hdparm -d). I know this didn't happen with FC2 so I tested the latest FC2 kernel (2.6.8-521) but that didn't even help. So then I started looking at some of the processes I didn't recognize from FC2, and actually think I found the culprit. If I stopped the "haldaemon" service (hald) my hard-driver performance was back to normal : # hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 84 MB in 3.03 seconds = 27.74 MB/sec # hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 84 MB in 3.03 seconds = 27.73 MB/sec What is the purpose of the "haldaemon" and why is it destroying my system performance ? Best regards, Steffen Persvold