Those are slowish times even for a 7200rpm disk. My desktop here at home (Ubuntu) has a slow 7200 drive and hdparam reports a lot faster than that. Well, it is a Caviar "Green" drive which means that 7200 is the fastest speed but it does spin slower too. amckay at amckay-desktop:~$ sudo !! sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda [sudo] password for amckay: /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 244 MB in 3.01 seconds = 81.10 MB/sec amckay at amckay-desktop:~$ -- “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV” - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"