What is the result of?
dd if=/dev/zero of=/some/filesystem/test count=100000 bs=8192
That will write an 810MB file of all zeros, and will give you a much
better idea of the raw streaming write performance vs copying files
from
the old 160GB drive to the new one. I would think the result should
be
a bit higher than 60MB/s.
Also, make sure you're using the deadline elevator instead of CFQ as
it
yields better performance, especially on SATA systems that don't
support
NCQ:
$ echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
You may want to add this to your boot scripts to make it permanent. I
roll this option as the default in my custom kernels.