There is a nice script to measure the access time of your disk.

Just copy the lines from the link in your terminal (you are supposed to run Perl and don’t forget, as I did first, to adjust the path to your disk ;) ) :

Laptop with Hitachi 100 Mb, 7200 rpm (OpenSuse 10.2) :

Took 24.57s for 1500 seeks of /dev/hda (93 GB)
Mean: 16.4ms; Median: 14-15ms; Std dev: 10.6ms

real 0m27.479s
user 0m0.120s
sys 0m0.050s

Server with Hitachi 80 Gb and 120 Gb, 7200 rpm, 8 Mb of cache (Debian 4.0) :

Took 20.15s for 1500 seeks of /dev/hda (76 GB)
Mean: 13.4ms; Median: 12-13ms; Std dev: 5.64ms

real 0m20.184s
user 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.092s

Took 19.5s for 1500 seeks of /dev/hdb (115 GB)

Mean: 13ms; Median: 11-12ms; Std dev: 3.77ms

real 0m19.534s
user 0m0.044s
sys 0m0.076s

Conclusion : I am pretty satisfied by the performances of my laptop disk.

Thanks to the author for this nice script.