I wasn't sure if this was hardware or software related, but since it involves the kernel, I chose software. Yesterday I upgraded from 2.4.26 to 2.6.9, a few issues exist, but all were to be expected. Overall, I'm very impressed, my framerate nearly tripled and everything is a lot faster. Everything, that is, except my hard drive. Before I upgraded, hdparm -t would report something around 50 Mbit/second on each drive (IDE, so normal). After, upgrading, they are crawling at 3 Mbit/second. I figured that the drivers may not have been loading, so i went ahead and included every available chipset in the kernel as modules, so I'd be sure I got the right one (should be VIA), but even after doing that, there has been no change in my HD speeds. It's really only a problem when moving very large files, and its on my webserver, so it slows my pages down badly as well. Any ideas?