1 gig /min seems decent.

By the way, just as a bit of background on this aspect of HDD performance, it's worth noting the relationship between sustained throughput and areal density. At a given RPM a certain amount of hard-disk surface is swept by the heads per second, and if the resulting linear density is lower than the interface can deliver then that's what will constrain the sustained throughput.

That's what is so impressive about the new recording technologies such as those in the 750Gb Seagates - the aren't just big, they have extremely impressive throughput figures, which is no accident. Their increased capacity comes from a jump in areal density, which results in a jump in the swept linear density, hence better sustained throughput.

Of course, as with RAM the rate of capacity increase and the rate of throughput increase show different growth rates, and that has long-term consequences for the design of equipment. The inevitable result (as happens in every storage technology since the dawn of time) being the introduction of an additional tier of cache with intermediate performance, viz. "hybrid drives".