[reidrac]

I'm not sure how good is the test as it depends on the IO levels of the host where the VM instance is running.

This is a 1GB Debian Wheezy instance with regular HDD in Memset [1]:

    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, 17.7142 s, 60.6 MB/s

I checked the host and its load is average. DO's 33.6 MB/s sounds poor.

[1] disclaimer: Memset hosting is my employer, I built some of this; but this is an honest test (personal VM running several services).

EDIT: formatting

EDIT 2: same test on a VM with SSD disk:

    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, 3.48953 s, 308 MB/s

Again, the host has average load.