Haven't done it yet but will this weekend. I am not a guru but find it hard to believe that I can get greater transfer speeds between machines than I can within the actual machine. That just makes no sense to me. I have an XP box here and will be testing it with the same drives before I do anything. I suspect that those speeds will be different. If they are not then ... well I will accept that it is not a linux issue. Also I took the drives out and moved them to an old Hardy box and the parm test resutls were even higher (around the 70's for two of the disks and 40's for the one that is slower). While I agree that placement on the disk is important and recognize the affects of the mechanical side of things I again find it hard to accept that there is a 85% drop off due to inefficiency. Also one of the disks I use is nearly clean which begs the question. I kind of live by the rule that if there is even one exception to the hypothesis that you need a new hypothesis :) I will let you know what I find out and appreciate the other comments you passed along. BTW, not sure that if you booted from the live disk that will count as an accurate test. I get 1-2 mb throughput going to a USB so why should we see nearly that internal? Also would note that I have have seen many, many threads on this and have even seen (not sure I can place it now) the Ubuntu team admit that there is an issue. On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:38 PM, ZhangInSeattle