To start off -- a little background info...

I have a linux box (Fedora Core 1) running Samba 3.0.5. It has 2 hard drives installed. I also have a Powerbook G4 and a WinXP box. Transfer speeds, both incoming and outgoing, between the G4 and WinXP box are what they are supposed to be, averaging ~9mb/sec, nothing irregular. Transferring a file TO the linux box, using both the G4 and WinXP box are averging the same ~9mb/sec, nothing irregular again. BUT, when I try transferring a file FROM the linux box to either the G4 or the WinXP box, I got either a fluctuating speed between 800k/sec to 6mb/sec, averaging ~3mb/sec OR I would get a solid 8-9mb/sec that wouldn't fluctuate.

This didn't make any sense until I noticed that the only time I was getting the solid 9mb/sec was when I was getting a file that was located on my hdb. So I tested it again, I put identical files on hda and hdb, and low and behold, hda gave me crap speeds, while hdb gave me good speeds.

I went ahead and did a dmesg and found this:

hda: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=4865/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: 312581808 sectors (160042 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=19457/255/63, UDMA(100)

Could the 2mb Cache be the culprit in our crap speeds for Samba?