Thanks to those who pointed to resources. They gave me a great start and I have solved some of the problems I had resigned myself to live with since switching to IDE. I am now investigating the kernel's support for my particular chipset and think I can get an additional siginificant bump in sustained data rates.
For anyone with newer IDE drives that hasn't read these texts, do it. The default drive config is really conservative. You will be amazed at the results. Best, -=greg
