Ok, so somewhere I though that the 2.4 kernel might be kind enough to use reasonable settings for disk performance. NnnNOOOOO! Of course not.

Controller perf shows 50-55MB/sec which is good for this box (I think it’s UDMA/33).
My disk performances were roughly 3 and 5 MB/sec. DMA was off. Using my happy script below gained me a fill 3x performance for both disks.

for i in /dev/hda /dev/hdc ; do
   hdparm $i        #get hdparm settings for drive
   hdparm -i $i     #get device statistics
   hdparm -T $i     #test perf of controller (33, 66, 100, 133)
   hdparm -t $i     #test perf of current settings
   hdparm -d1  $i   #enable DMA mode
   hdparm -a16 $i   #enable 16 block reads
   hdparm -c1  $i   #enable 32-bit mode
   hdparm -m16 $i   #enable 16 sector I/O
   hdparm -k1  $i   #enable keep settings over reset
   hdparm -t $i     #test perf of new settings
done

I guess I should put that in rc.boot (minus -t, and plus -q)