My 5400 RPM hd in my laptop (with DMA enabled) has transfer rates of 1-2MB/sec under linux (and i know its much faster in windows) this leads to slow startups and songs constantly skipping. I don't get why its being so slow but if someone has had this problem before and can help out it would be much appreciated. I'm running Ubuntu if its of any use.

What's the output of
- hdparm <device>
- hdparm -tT <device>
?

root@ubuntu:~# hdparm /dev/hda && hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 734 MB in 2.00 seconds = 366.92 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 38 MB in 3.12 seconds = 12.19 MB/sec

Hrm...12MB/sec is faster than the 1 or 2 I was seeing in xfce's hd usage plugin but its still really slow even for a 5400rpm drive right? I mean shouldnt it be around at least 50?

I had the same problem with my XPS M1210. The problem was that my linux box was configuring the HD as a PATA one. The solution was to use the flag hda=noprobe in my lilo.conf (dont remember the exact syntax, but I guess it is something like option="hda=noprobe".

Ohh thanks I'm gonna try that right now just need to look up the right syntax...or well make sure yours is correct

Ok so i edited the kopts line in grubs menu.lst and hda=noprobe did nothing but make my comp not boot...i then tried (from the other hda= options i found) hda=autotune and now hdparm -tT /dev/hda outputs:
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 838 MB in 2.00 seconds = 418.55 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 96 MB in 3.03 seconds = 31.70 MB/sec
(: not bad Thanks for the help

In my laptop, the HD was first recognoiced as hda, when I put the option the HD was recognoiced as sda. It seem that this isn't your case.