Hi Mark.

I just wondered about a few things while installing a new (software) raid-5 IDE array in my Linux box. I thought you might be able to comment on these:

1. While copying files to the raid (and having an rc5 client run in the background at maximum nice level), I noticed that the load went up to 5 or even higher, but with CPU usage of approx. 60% system, 20% user and 20%idle. While I can understand the first two, I have no idea why I could have a load of 5 with 20% idle time. Any hint?
2. I also noticed that the raid driver reports a few stats in /proc/mdstats, the particular thing that made me look there twice was that it reported on its writing speed during resynchronization of the raid discs. Don't remember the exact phrase used, but it showed a nice little progress bar, along with a textual comment like "X% done, Y minutes remaining, writing in background with ZZZZZ kBytes/second". It was writing at about 22MBytes/s on an idle system, and about 15 on a loaded one. Nice. I was wondering if the IDE driver could report its current throughput in a similar manner.
   

Any comments from you?

cu,
sven