Actually, I was doing some disk benchmarking a couple of weeks ago,
and found the same thing as someone else on the list reported:
performance through the filesystem seems pretty bad on a 486.

My machine:

486dx4/100, 24 MB, BT-445C VLB SCSI, Quantum 1080S and 240S

dd gave me around 3 MB/sec.

IOZONE reported high numbers for small files (around 10 MB/sec for 1
MB - I assume that everything was cached), and leveled off to a dismal
1.2 MB/sec as the file size got larger.

Any ideas on where this slowdown is coming from?

Todd Williamson
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University