My E5400 came with a 160 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.3 (model ST9160411ASG) hard drive. As all S-ATA drives it appears as SCSI drive in Linux systems, as block device files /dev/sda, /dev/sdb and so on.

The linear read throughput of the disk ranges from 45 to 90 MB/s, measured with zcav. You can download the raw data from here.

See that the performance for the outer tracks is a lot better than that on the inner ones. That is the reason why the performance of the first hard disk partitions is better than that of the last ones. You should keep that in mind, when planning your partion scheme.