It's difficult to take things you say seriously when generally "the sky is falling" is your attitude, like I said last time I pointed this out, you seem to assume people are running mammoth business production systems with 256gb of ram, 76 drives and gigabit networks. As the developers have started noting in some threads and on the bug tracker, there's going to be mid-range users starting to use this OS more and more as it becomes easier to work with
In one thread, where I pointed out I had attained 80mb/s sustained writes, which dropped to 20mb/s sustained you noted the CPU in my server was weak (it isn't great) and it's probably that, despite evidence it had attained higher speeds earlier. You've insisted without ECC ram the sky will fall, you've told me that anything less than 8gb is sacrilege (yet someone posted the other day about a system which had run for over a year, with TWOgb) You can see my skepticism here.
Regardles, my disk is dead and my data is still good, so that's the important thing. I'll shut her down next week, pull the disk and wait the shitty 4 weeks it'll take to replace in this backwards country with awful retail support and long mailing times if you go direct to manufacturer.
Yes I know ticking isn't going to be 100% indicative of disk activty, or rather, system level disk activity. It could be the same WD spindown weirdness of endlessly parking heads or any other combination of thing. Regardless I have not only a ticking disk but a disk that ticked significantly more today. Actuators need to move, this is why sequential stuff is best while we're still stuck with ghastly mechanical disks