Hmm, that's a sticky widget. Have you tried any other HD benchmarks and gotten similar results? I think we need that to narrow it down to either a Bonnie or hardware issue. It could be that some of ur disks are preparing to die. I have seen that before, a disk that's getting flaky will do strange things. If you can get your ear near the disk or put your finger on it you should be able to tell if it starts thrashing. If it's thrashing when you know it shouldn't, I'ld pop that sucker ASAP. If the unnatural thrashing coincides with the throughput drop then I think you have ur culprit. (do this with all the relevent disks of course) Now if the hardware's fine then there's almost no telling where the problem lies without extensive trial and error testing. Russell you might want to make a super debug version of Bonnie that gathers statistics from each step in the pipeline from the application to the platter. I would look very closely at the RAID controller driver. I'm in the middle of a fight right now with Adaptec over file corruption and I eventually narrowed it down to the driver. They want to blame everything except themselves.
Incidentally, if ur thinking of upgrading ur storage system check this mugga out: http://www20.tomshardware.com/storage/20030425/index.html Good luck, let me know if you discover anything. -- REMEMBER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ---=< WTC 911 >=-- "...ne cede males" 00000100
