Eradic disk access during reads

[Al Boldi]

Monitoring disk access using gkrellm, I noticed that a command like

cat /dev/hda > /dev/null

shows eradic disk reads ranging from 0 to 80MB/s on an otherwise idle system.

1. Is this a hardware or software problem?
2. Is there a lightweight perf-mon tool (cmd-line) that would log this 
behaviour graphically?

Thanks!

--
Al

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