You might want to start a new thread so we don't hijack this guy's thread but in the mean time...
8 Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB 5400 RPM SATAs
RAID 1+0 - 6 drives in RAID, 2 hot spares
P410 (and previous P400) both had cache battery (lack of battery can make a difference)
For this particular server I needed storage space, not speed (SAN, NAS not possible at this site). My other box at this site has 15,000 RPM SAS. I can run an HD tune but I'm sure I'm not going to get great results. What is your virtual hard drive configuration on your host running HD tune? Thin, thick?
I'm far from a VMware expert but I'll help where I can.