I wrote on that mailing list that there was a problem of PCI assignation on a laptop with intel 845 chipset, preventing the dma to be activated with hdparm -d1, crippling the performances of the HDD.
I found another thread about that problem, offering a patch to the kernel : http://hypermail.idiosynkrasia.net/linux-kernel/archived/2002/week17/0699.html Apparently, this may concern laptops with i845 and a Radeon mobility chip (which is my case, a RM7500 chip). The patch can be found on http://linuxdiskcert.org/ by Andre Hedrick, who works on the ATA development in Linux, and so I guess the Slackware 8.1 kernel was patched with it. Eric
