Software RAID-1 Performance/Tuning

[Sam Alex]

I've installed Software RAID-1 on Red Hat 7.3, and all is working fine, but
when copying large chunks of data to the drive - 10mege or more - it brings
the system to a crawl.

My system is a PIII-1Ghz wigh 1 Gig of RAM. Both drives are IDE IBM 80 Gig
on different IDE controllers - hdb and hdc. My raid device is /dev/md0.

I know since I'm using Software RAID, it'll run a bit slower, but I didn't
expect this much lag. If I copy larger chuncks, like 500 megs or more, I
might as well leave the system and tell users not to use it until it's
done.

Does anyone know how to fine-tune this or get better performance.. short of
going with Hardware RAID or SCSI??? I thought maybe there's some tweaks or
changes that might help. I'm looking into getting a third IDE controller
added, which would take the boot drive and one mirrored drive off the same
controller. I'm crossing my fingers that this will help.

Thanks for any help.

Sam