A literal pile of 2.5-inch SATA disks, you say? If they were pulls from a hardware RAID box or some such, the disks' firmware may disable write caches by default. I have a couple of Seagate OEM HP disks that came out of a RAID system and their performance (both read and write) was dismal until I enabled the caches with
$ dkctl /dev/rwdNd setcache rw Since the cache state is not savable on the drives I have, I put this in my "/etc/rc.local" to run on the affected disks at each boot. -- |/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS NetBSD Darwin/MacOS X |\ / jdbaker[snail]mylinuxisp[flyspeck]com OpenBSD FreeBSD | X No HTML/proprietary data in email. BSD just sits there and works! |/ \ GPGkeyID: D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4 BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645
