Re: RAID5 slowness (how to fix?)

David Stuart wrote:

I have 3 IDE drives in this raid configuration (4 drives in total). They
are all currently NOT on separate IDE channels (meaning, they are
master/slave, master/slave). I read somewhere this might not be a "Good
Thing" (tm). Could it be causing my performance degredation?

Yes, to some extent. Spend the $30 for an add-in IDE card and you'll get better performance.

Also, I noticed just about an hour ago that (for some reason) the drives
do not seem to have DMA enabled. I have turned that on now but am unsure
as to the degree of impact this might have.

'hdparm -t /dev/md0' with and without DMA enabled will give you a rough idea as to the impact.
.