Slap Self.
I can be so dumb sometimes. This is clearly obvious to anybody that knows me, but anyway. I made a little tiny mistake several years ago, never really worried about it until lately. I’ve been noticing that the load average on the file server just goes through the roof whenever NFS transactions are taking place. I figured, without thinking too much about it, that the 900 Mhz Athlon just wasn’t up to handling the ‘power’ of my more modern hardware connected to it.
It turns out, and this just blows my mind, that I never actually compiled the IDE driver into the kernel. Perhaps it didn’t exist when I was using the 2.4.x series, but either way, I’ve apparently been running this thing for years without using the proper drivers. Hdparm was reporting an absolutely horrible buffered disk read of 3.99 MB/Sec, now with the right driver it reads a massively quicker 37.27 MB/Sec. Of course the SATA drive in my new box easily does twice that, and obliterates it when doing cached reads (16MB cache vs. 2MB).
Anyway, looks like I don’ t need to upgrade the CPU (and of course then the memory, motherboard, probably the power supply, ugh) on the fileserver after all!
D’oh!