On Wednesday, November 14, 2001 9:12 PM, scorpio@arshes.dyndns.org wrote > I have a bit of a problem. Every time I work with big files (movies, > converting mp3s to wavs for ripping), my system slows down to a crawl for > some time, while it is emptying the buffers I had a similar problem the first time I used IDE instead of SCSI. I was able to eradicate it (and how!) using hdparm--particularly the dma and irq masking options. Hope it helps. -=greg