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.