I'm running Fedora Core 4, using an SiI 3112A SATA controller, and Maxtor DiamondMax 10, Maxtor 6B250S0, 250 GB drives in a RAID 1 configuration (specified on the 3112A controller). OS and pagefile are run on a separate 30GB IDE drive. Goal is to create a cheap, large, mirrored 250 GB Network Attached Storage (using Samba) for a Windows network.

My SATA drive seems to be running excessively slow. For example, I set up an FTP site on the computer in question, and put one virtual directory on the IDE drive, and another virtual directory on the SATA drive. The transfer speed to the IDE virtual directory was almost 3 times faster than the transfer speed to the SATA virtual directory. My impression is that SATA was supposed to be faster than IDE--am I wrong?

Most of the speed tweak articles I've seen out there focus on IDE drives. Anyone have ideas on how to tweak/manage performance of SATA drives on Fedora Core 4?