Macbook Pro Hard drive speed I have an early 2011 Macbook Pro with a Toshiba MK7559GSXP 750GB 5400rpm hard drive (that has about 48GB free) and running El Capitan.  Recently I had the feeling that things were running slowly (and I probably have been ignoring it up until now), so I downloaded and ran Blacmagicdesign's Disk Speed Test 2.2.2

This speed test gave me a read and write speed of about 50 MB/s which my gut feeling is saying is not very good.

I also ran the Disk Utility's First Aid and the drive passed all the tests applied by that utility.  So:


Is this an unreasonable read/write speed?
Would it be due to the hard drive being less than 10% full?
Something else that I am missing?


After the storm

I just replaced the hard drive with a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD.  The boot time halved, Apps open almost immediately, the Disk Speed Test pegs at 480 MB/s and the Negotiated link speed is 6 GB/s.  

Thats all good, but the weirdest things is how quiet it sounds now!
The first thing you want to do is reference the drive specs to see what it is rated in terms of data transfer speed.

According to C/Net, it has an external data transfer rate of 300MBs (it's a SATA drive, so this is expected)



So, if you are getting a drive speed rating of 50MB/s, things are definitely slow.  5400 RPM is also quite slow to begin with.

Your best option is to upgrade your drive to an SSD.  I have written a post that addresses this very topic.  Have a look here: My Mac is getting really slow, what should I do?