@nprofile1q... No, I definitely mean 3MB/s. That's been my pretty consistent observation on random-access HDD performance on Linux and Windows. It's *that* slow.
That's assuming all reads miss the cache. Otherwise, yeah, it'll be faster.
I didn't manually rig anything to get this result. This is real-world desktop performance reading many scattered files (which defrag doesn't help much), as reported by GKrellM and Task Manager.
Perhaps a faster HDD would be faster, but 🤷♂️.