The case of the pulsing file system
 

As is customary when nuking a harddrive, I backed up all of my media (a life's work of mp3s) to another hd partition. Now, under Slack 9 I retrieved the mp3s from this partition (an ntfs windows partition on the same harddrive) and the transfer rate pulsed from around 8MB/sec to 100k/sec. I've tried this both under Slack 9 with an ext2 and ext3 fses. The only reason I ask is that in the dark few hours I tried Mandrake 9.1 <shudder> :D, the transfer was smooth and quick...what's the difference here?

Maybe hdparm needs to be set. Look at cache options, dma. Also, I think maybe 'async' as an option in mount for your filesystem might help (never tried it myself but it sure sounds like it'd speed some things up).

Cool