we are having very high iodone waits. and i was wonderign if somone on a list has had to go thru the same issues thisis a snap from the statspack reports. Avg Total Wait wait Waits Event Waits Timeouts Time (s) (ms) /txn ---------------------------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ------ -------- io done 7,318,903 5,192,927 122,807 17 146.5 sbtwrite2 4,240,771 0 126,120 30 84.9 io done 7,318,903 5,192,927 122,807 17 146.5 currently we are on gen1 tape drive plannign to move to gen2's the backup of a 1 tbte database takes around 4 hours but the application timings go up by 20% i am also looking at ways people have had to use the rate or the readrate parameter to throttle down the amount of i/o and tune down rman. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l