I've got a bunch of centos 5 boxes with Intel X-25 drives (x25-m in dev, x25-e in prod, I think). We're seeing severely degraded disk performance on one of our dev boxes (which easily does 5+ gb of writes every day, meaning we write the full drive's worth of data several times a month).

The box in question:

• Intel x25-m
• Ext3 (which doesn't support TRIM)
• centos 5
• vmware ESXi

Wikipedia mentions that newer versions of hdparm (which centos5 doesn't include) can bulk-TRIM free blocks. This utility also sounds potentially useful: http://blog.patshead.com/2009/12/a-quick-and-dirty-wipersh-fix-for-intel-x25-m.html

Disk write performance has dropped to <1 MB/sec while copying a 300 meg directory on this system, as of a month or so ago -- it used to be able to perform the same copy operation at least 5 times faster.

What can I do to recover performance on this system?