Yes it is a problem. This game constantly reads-writes and in a horribly inefficient manner. This game caches a whole lot of info, and from what I understand does not handle the read and write buffers terribly well.

Many, many people have reported that upgrading to better hard drives, or switching over to Raid 0 arrays, or switching to SSDs having improved or, in the case of SSDs, removed the stuttering issues.

Having a 7200rpm SATA2 drive does not inherently mean you have a great hard drive. That's like saying that my race car has X top speed on the speedometer, there for it is better than your race car. There are a whole lot of factors involved beyond one ore two stats.

That said, any game that has the hard drive as a bottle neck needs to improved because omg, that's such a basic function. -.-