What's your MBP HD's writing & reading speed

Question

I found there might be problems with my makbook pro 1.83g,
The writing & reading speed is slow!
I made 2 partitions of the HD, and tried copying a 280mb video file from partition A to partition B. I opened active monitor to have the readings.
The disk writing & reading speed has never reached 20mb/s, never,,,,,,,.
My g5 1.6 is 43mb/s.
As I remembered, the HD inside the MBP is actually SATA 5400RPM HD, which should be fast, isn't it?
what do you think? what's your readings?

Answer 1

2 partitions of the HD, and tried copying a 280mb
video file from partition A to partition B
You do realize that copying to different partitions
on the same HD is a very poor judge of speed don't
you? The Heads must first read, then write, then
read.... In effect, you will see about half the speed
that you would if you were copying to a different HD
on a different bus. In that case one drive would be
only reading while the other drive is only writing.
Makes a heck of a difference. Try copying to a
different drive, preferably on a different bus, if
you want to judge speed. Or just get a copy of Xbench
and run the disk test
TiBook 667, FW800 Dual 1.25  
Mac OS X (10.4.6)  
I will try xbench right away