On Aug 25, 2009, at 10:02 AM, Gerald Michalak wrote:

My money is on the SATA disk pool.  I ran into something similar
with many
spindles of SATA disk and was expecting it to fly. nope.

Indeed.  Vendors often cite SATA and SAS technology throughput rates,
leading the customer to believe that is what they will get.  But when
you delve into the box to find out what vendor disk model is actually
inside, and check the disk specs for the data rates for that model,
you'll often find that the achievable rate is substantially less,
factoring in RAID configuration.

   Richard Sims