Block Device Tuning One problem which could manifest itself in older kernels (2.6.9 which for example is the stock kernel in Scientific Linux 4) is the size of io requests which are buffered before they are communicated to the disk. In 2.6.9 the default value of that for every block device is 8192. In the newer kernels it is 128. One can see that the change in default value is substantial. The tro