Comment 7 for bug 268588

Thanks. I can't see anything obviously wrong with that drive. It's only a bit slow on cached reads. Something strange is that hdparms is unable to detect the right ide/ata standards.

You can run a test to determine if the slowness of your system is due to some hardware malfunction.
- Install the package sysstat
- copy a large amount of data in order to reproduce the issue
- run "iostat -x /dev/sda" and report the results

I've also noticed that the ide interface and the audio device are sharing the same irq. Can you please follow the steps at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingIRQProblems and see if it helps.