ASUS P4S8X, 2400 MHz P4, 512 MB DDR, WD800 80GB IDE

After booting 3.8.1 for the first time today, I noticed that mkntfs was taking forever to zero-out a partition. I confirmed with dd that I am getting only about 2 MB /second written to the ide drive (WD800). Same result with or without drive write cache. Initial writes go about 4 MB/sec, then degrade over one or two minutes down to a steady 2 MB/sec.

In 3.7 the same operation writes a steady 36 MB/second with no degradation over time.


The command to test this is (after using qtparted to create a 25 GB ntfs partition)

dd if=/dev/zero ibs=65536k obs=8032k of=/dev/hda7

(use "kill -USR1 $dd_PID" in another shell to monitor the bytes/sec)


Have I overlooked something obvious?

Thanks and Best Regards,

Jeff Buckles
Aloha, OR, USA