Hi, Thanks for the replies on this. Directing an extra channel to the disk getting less data sent to it helped. But it turns out that the disk unit in question is having a cache problem due to a faulty battery. So the writes to it are a lot slower, than the other unit. So in fact rman is doing its job, keeping the channel directed to the good disk unit busy, whilst waiting for the others to finish. Regards Pete ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l