An adaptive controller which is robust to the unknown load disturbance is developed for electro-hydraulic speed control systems. Since the load disturbance degrades the performance of the controller such as a steady state error and rise time in the conventional control system, appropriate adjustment of the controller is necessary in order to obtain the desired performances. The adaptation mechanism was designed to tune the feedforward gain, based upon minimization of ITAE (integral of time-multiplied absolute error) performance. The unknown load distrubance was identified by using an analog computer from the relationship between the velocity of the hydraulic motor and the load pressure. To evaluate the performance of the controller a series of simulations and experiments were conducted for various load conditions. Both results show that the proposed adaptive controller shows abetter performance than the conventional controller in terms of the steady state error and rise time.