Comment by kawsper

This is mine old $20 located in London, doing exactly nothing, I just created it last week, it seems very slow in comparison:

  dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 13,6791 s, 78,5 MB/s

  hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
  /dev/xvda:
  Timing cached reads:   3580 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1794.00 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads: 336 MB in  3.01 seconds = 111.75 MB/sec