This is not a SCSI hard drive, Its a usb hard drive. How would you say this, hmmmm its modularly loaded as a SCSI device!! Just like a cdburner.

Here is the output from my IDE drives:

[root@schrock321 schrock]# /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hdg5

/dev/hdg5:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.24 seconds =533.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.16 seconds = 55.17 MB/sec


Im running a maxtor IDE controller card. It runs about 33% faster that my onboard IDE controller card.

anyone got this 55.17 MB/sec beat :)

I would like to know what SATA (serial ata can do) I hear all of this hipe about sata. Some one have some sata drive results?

Celeron 1.7
2-WD 7200 rpm hd
no changes to hdparm

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda /dev/hdb

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.32 seconds =400.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.39 seconds = 46.04 MB/sec

/dev/hdb:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.35 seconds =365.71 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.38 seconds = 46.38 MB/sec

Electro is absolutely right, that's why I didn't bother with individual partitions and FS, and the discussion had already shifted to hdparm and it's settings and I forgot to mention it.
I'm using reiserfs for my / since before ext3 was made available and always was very pleased with it so I never tried ext3.
For my /home and other storage, where I have larger files, music, movies and stuff, I use XFS.

Lostboy, what you see is what you get, as I said no obscure and magical hdparm string,
the hardware involved is pretty much in the posting, btw that's part of the output of lshw, something like lspci but more complete.
Probably not included in your distro, see freshmeat if you're interested.

I'm on kernel-2.6.0-test11 but I get those figures on 2.4 also, nothing special really.

One thing you have to realize is that your actual throughput will always revert to the slowest protocol supported by either your drive or the controller.
i.e ATA66 driver on a ATA100 controller will run @ ATA66, same for ATA100 drive on ATA66 or worse ATA33 chipset or external controller.
And then there's probably chipsets that are not supported as well and for those, I guess setting parametres through hdparm might be required to get the most out of the hardware, but I've been so lucky to never have to mess with it on both my systems.