Running hdparm shows me that hda + hdc are using DMA and IO is about 45 Mb/sec
I have 2 IDE disks, each on a different bus (hda on IDE0 is for RH9 and hdc on IDE1 is for vmware).
I suspect a diskio problem, but with what exactly?
Check the drives with: /sbin/hdparm /dev/hdx (where x = a or c), especially if the using_dma flag is on. If your motherboard is too new it could be the ide controller is operating in pio mode which slows a system down during disk access...
The machine is a 2x Xeon processor using ServerWorks chipset which seems to be well supported by Linux.
Don't know why it's so slow.... -jec
