Thank you for the assistance.

The dmesg output says:
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present, but unused
(no driver support)

The result of the transfer test was quite worrying too:
The old PC (Celeron Intel 815) with 14913080 bytes/sec
while the new PC (P4 Celeron Intel 845) with 2631720 bytes/sec

>From this I gather that my options are either to upgrade to 1.6 or
to try and patch the 1.5.1 drivers. Is this correct? Are there any other
possible soltuons to the problem?

Again I would be very grateful for any thoughts and suggestions,

Ian

> > >
> > > An added note is the the system improves dramatically with netBSD 1.6
> and both PC's operate as expected. However I do not want to upgrade to 1.6
> just yet and would like a solution for 1.5.1, if possible.
> > >
> > possibly NetBSD 1.5 doesn't fully support this new IDE controller while
> > 1.6 do so.
> >
> > please look at dmesg output if this harddrive use DMA at all.
> >
> > to measure transfers
> >
> > dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=/dev/null bs=64k count=2048
> >
> > is useful (on really fast drives try higher count).
> >
> > please do not mail with almost no line breaks. it could be (and is)
> > annoying.
> >
> >
>
>
>
>