I noticed a bunch of articles regarding highly praised Seagate 7200.10 disk series and a couple of forum threads: one, two (I am sure there are others as well).
The problem is if you got a drive with an AAK firmware – it is abnormally slow (see article). Unfortunately I have one of these and can confirm the bad HD Tune results as others are reporting – at least my results are similar but not exactly the same since I have a 750GB drive instead of 320GB the people are talking about. Looks like my drive is having hardware problems, too. Since the Seagate is unwilling to comment (According to second forum's thread, at the bottom, they just say that this version is an OEM and it should never see retail stores. And since it is an OEM version Seagate isn't supporting it.) it is a big possibility that these results are correct and drive performance sucks. But it gets even worse – firmware is written on ROM and thus can't be flashed. Isn't that just great. I guess the hard disk price fall has its own bad side.
I am also getting some hardware errors, it seems (perhaps this is related to bad results?). Not sure why there are a vast amount of errors and HD Tune reports status as OK.
The bottom line is to avoid 7200.10 AAK versions unless you are sure that its performance is OK. At least I will be very cautious when buying a new drive, specially from a Seagate.