I'm hoping someone will have some suggestions on what we can do about this. We are running a RAID-5 array on our RedHat 9 MySQL server. The controller is an LSI MegaRAID 320-1 card, and we have 5 Fujitsu U-320 10k RPM drives. Over the past week, we have been doing some conversions (remotely), which of course causes a lot of reading and writing to the drives. For some reason though, all the conversions seem to stop about once per minute and pause for about 10-15 seconds at a time. It doesn't matter if we have just 1 PC running these conversions or 3, they all seem to pause at random intervals. The weird thing is that if we run these same conversions against a test box that has RH installed, same kernel, same version of MySQL, etc... there are no pauses. This is leading me to believe it's something with this server, which should have no problems with this kind of thing. Here are the specs on the server:

Dual 2.66 GHz Xeon Processors
2 GB ECC DDR RAM
5 Fujitsu 10K RPM U-320 SCSI drives in RAID-5
LSI MegaRAID 320-1 Controller
Intel 1000 mpbs NIC
Redhat 9 with all updates

The firmware and drivers for the RAID card are also up to date.

So, might anyone have any ideas why only this machine would exhibit these slowdowns?

TIA