the other day I was moving several gigs of files from one ide drive to another on the same ide chain (the secondary channel is broken) and my load average went up to around 7 (no, not 0.07). The machine would become unresponsive for several seconds at a time. This is a uniprocessor machine, both drives are ext2 filesystems. Is this normal? I don't seem to remember having ide performance issues like this before (this is a new install). -jason