Yes, it has been slower than usual for me too, of late.
I've been low on disk space so blamed that, but I put a new 120 gig drive in yesterday, and the speed has not changed much.
Brucie story:
in 1982, when I was first experimenting with PCs, before the IBM PC was released over here, I was evaluating a 'PC'- the DEC Rainbow - that had been donated to my Director and the computer was based on the same Intel chip as the IBM, the Intel 8088. The system had 64k of RAM and only a single 5.25" floppy drive, and I enquired about the cost of a 5 megabyte hard disk upgrade [yes, five megabytes, the most you could get then]. The cost was £2,500, just for the drive.
The 120 gigabyte drive I bought this week was £57 [about the cost of a petrol fill-up for the car], and I could have got it cheaper if I had shopped around.
Just shows what progress has been made.