Terrible disk i/o on Compaq DS10L

[mello]

Hello:

We have a problem here. Our new beowulf is a rack of Compaq DS10L 600
mhz alphas with ide drives. We're running Red Hat 6.2.  The problem is
that we can only get ~2.5 mbytes/second disk i/o - as reported by hdparm
-tT .  This has been fairly common with our intel systems but I could
always adjust the hdparm parameters and do much better.
( 10 - 25 mbyte/sec depending on the drive ) With these machines no
parameters have any effect.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Does anyone have a fix that doesn't
involve SCSI?

Thanks... mel jones