I have an Althlon 2400+ with sata drives with 8mb cache and I get the following when I run "hdparm -t /dev/sda" /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 200 MB in 3.02 seconds = 66.24 MB/sec BLKFLSBUF failed: Operation not supported HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Operation not supported Don't know if this helps.