Poor Disk Performance on VMs; Host using PERC H310 RAID 5

I have a Dell R620 running 5 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA 3Gbps
2.5in Hot-plug Hard Drives in a PERC H310 controller (which I am beginning to regret
buying).

I am getting awful read/write speeds
on Linux VMs (Fedora 19, Cent 6 and Ubuntu 12.04) running ESXi 5.0 free license. Using
Thin, Thick or Sparse VMDKs don't make a
difference.

An example
hdparm:

cached reads 9750 MB in
            2.00 seconds = 4877.74 MB/sec
buffered reads: 42 MB in 3.44 seconds = 12.21
            MB/sec

Also
a dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=2048 (to create an arbitrary 2GB file) took
about a minute and a half!

I have a very similar
host with a software RAID controller that has similar VMs which are much faster in disk
speeds. I didn't set up the RAID, I only manage the server, but IT sets them
up.

The Datastore shows an average 1.189
millisecond latency for reads and a 6.3 millisecond latency for writes. The datastore
shows 1.89 TB so that is about correct for 5 x 500 GB drives in a RAID 5. Initially I
was thinking maybe it isn't using all of the drives. What could be going on? I have
asked IT to take a look at the RAID BIOS and see if there are some diagnostics we can
run.

UPDATE
I
realized the one faster host has 10K RPM disks and the newer one has
7.2K

UPDATE
2

Is it possible that ESXi being run off of a SD
card is causing performance to lag for disk operations within
VMs?

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