On Tue, 17 May 2005, Jay Strauss wrote:

I'm very unfamiliar with options for speeding up hard drive access.
What might Knoppix be setting (and how would I look for it), that it's
getting 100% better drive performance than a plain jane Sarge install?

The usual culprit is DMA. (Or lack of it in your case)

What does

  hdparm /dev/hda

give under each OS?

You can use hdparm to enable DMA, but this doesn't always work - the real
solution is to work out what type of IDE controller you have and make sure
it's compiled into your kernel.

Gordon