why averaging only 4MB/s and how to spare bad blocks?

[sjs]

dave
i'm having similar problems again.
i started a Smart Update on a 300GB drive that was successfully Smart Updated 1 week ago.

in the meantime, not much changed, except perhaps 100 newly tagged mp3s and os x internals...

it started fine and said the apparent copy speed was 250MB/s.
great.
but 3/4 of the way through it slowed down.

now here's the weird part. when i say slowed down, it is almost *stopped*.

i mean, i look at both the external source and external destination, and neither light is on.

absolutely no data being xferred while these lights are off.

yet the CPU is near pegged on a PB G4 1Ghz.

then..every 5-10 seconds or so, the HD light might flash.

its like SD is caught in analysis paralysis mode...thinking about what to do next with 99% of the CPU resources and only once in a while doing an actual copy.

i note 20 minutes later that it is *not* frozen; # of files copied continues to grow; yet HD's remain mostly off.

this is what happened before.

do you know whats going on here?

also top shows a ditto process ... is that you? i thought you said you didn't use ditto but i didn't call it...