[TriLUG] Slow hard drive Centos 5.6

[Mike Norwood]

Hello,

We have been purchasing Dell Vostro's and loading them with Centos and 
everything has been working great.  Recently Dell changed their models on 
their slim tower Vostro's from 230 to 260, which meant they got rid of PCI 
slots for PCIexpress and got rid of the still useful serial port.  We have 
been loading Centos 5.6 and it still loads fine and everything works, but 
the hard drive performance is now so much slower.  It now sees the SATA 
drive as /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda.   Google searches say to check the 
bios and make sure all the SATA stuff is turned on, but these Dell 
computers have very limited bios settings and no real control over 
anything.  Just wondered if anyone else had ever seen anything similar or 
had any possible solutions.  

Thanks in advance,  Mike in Hillsborough