That depends on a bazillion factors, a few of which are:
- your actual harddrive - some do onboard caching, some don't. Some have adapative search strategies, most don't.
- where it's located - is it in the case or on the network somewhere?
- how you're connected to it - megabit? dual-gigabit SAN? Serial? SCSI?
- what OS you're using - MS vs. Linux vs. Solaris vs. VMS vs. ...
- what filesystem you're using - ext3 vs. reiser3 vs. reiser4 vs. WinFS vs. ...
- Any number of options your sysadmin(s) might have set
- The rest of the load on the box / SAN / etc ...
- Any caching done by other applications - Oracle, for instance, has some aggressive caching
- How much RAM you have - it doesn't help your I/O speed if your cache is in a page which is on disk
In other words, the benchmark can vary even by time of day or day of the week or even day of the
year. (If you have a bunch of quarterly reports that are run, that can affect your database load which affects your OS caching performance which affect your ... you get the picture.)
Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.