[vox-tech] Raid 1 - Fresh Install - Drives seem slow

[Jay Strauss]

Hi,

I just installed Sarge on an old PPro 180Mhz, with / on a RAID1 device 
and everything else on RAID1/VG/LVGs (which is very easy using the new 
Debian installer).  I'm building this machine to be an offsite backup 
machine.

It took 10hrs to sync my 100GiB partition, the first time, which seems a 
bit slow.

I'm using 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160021A 160GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra 
ATA100 Hard Drive drives, each as the master on separate controllers 
(one of the drives has a CD as a slave)

Googling, I've found a couple of tests like:

time dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=64k count=10000

which takes like 55 seconds (it only takes roughly 25 seconds on various 
other machines I have including an old P133)

I also ran: hdparm -tT /dev/hda, as described in the windows thread by 
Karsten, and it came in at 28 MB/s

- Does the processor speed have anything to do with I/O performance?
- What other tests might I run to prove it's slow?
- What other things might I look for to improve the speed?

Thanks
Jay