No, I've not tried yet. Inaam-san told me that Linux had a few I/O
schedulers but I'm not familiar with them. I'll find information
about them (how to change the scheduler settings) and try the same
test.
I am sorry, your response just slipped by me. The docs for RHEL (I believe you are running RHEL which has 2.6.9 kernel) say that it does support selectable IO scheduler.
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/limits/ I am not sure where else to look for scheduler apart from /sys
regards,
inaam