Why are disk writes so slow?

I am reading Richard Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX
Environment," a most excellent book.

Out of curiosity, I tried his I/O efficiency program on my IBM
A30 Thinkpad, running 6.0-RELEASE with default tuning parameters.
The test program reads file on stdin and writes to stdout, and
you modify bufsize to watch how time changes.

As in his example (with a bufsize of 8192),

time ./a.out < 1.5M-testfile > /dev/null

runs five times faster than (clock time)

time ./a.out < 1.5M-testfile > /a.out.out

Can someone explain to me why writing is five times as slow as
writing? What's going on in the computer?

The file is not O_SYNC, so it can't be validating the data on the
disk.

Later in the same chapter, he shows the impact of O_SYNC flag. I
re-ran this experiment too, and while everything is two orders of
magnitude faster than his times in the book, the relative speed
of writing with O_SYNC is three times slower.

1993 2006
----- ----
normal write 2.3s .023s
O_SYNC 13.4s .364s
slowdow factor 5.8 15.8

Is this all b/c disks are so much larger?

m
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