Is my harddrive slow??

How fast do you want them to be? Where are you getting comparable numbers to think yours is slow? I don't understand why people run benchmark programs when they don't know how to look up the baseline numbers to compare them with.

 

It's relative: generally flash ram is about 300% faster than physical disks, so compared to a new Air yours probably will always seem a bit sluggish even if you switch to scsi3 raptors

 

Again, if you don't have a baseline to compare it to, then running the bench test is pointless. I would check out Anand's website and read up on his various hard drive reviews and compare your results there.

On a side note, what made you run the test to begin with? In all my years of buying hard drives, I've never just run a test for the hell of it since I'm not a blogger about hard drives. I've purchased 5400 RPM drives knowing they will be slow. 7200RPM drives knowing they will perform better, and 15,000 RPM drives for my DB servers knowing it will help improve overall seek time.

It never occurred to me to test the drives unless they fail completely - and even then, testing would be pointless. I guess I just don't get why you tested them if you don't know what the numbers mean and are too lazy to google other test benchmarks.

To answer your question: If you have a Ferrari but only need to go 3 feet, there's no need to floor the gas pedal to advance the three feet. Therefore, lower write speed for non-sequential 4k blocks is perfectly normal since the size of those blocks is proportional/significantly less than the write speed you witnessed.

 

yes, thats all normal. Hard drives are much slower for random writes, because the head has to move much more often. If you want faster random writes, you will need to get an SSD.