I believe you, but your benchmark is not very useful. I get this on two 5400rpm 3T HDDs in a mirror:
$ time du -sh .
935G .
real 0m1.154s
Simply because there's less than 20 directories and the files are large.
I should have been more clear: It's my http cache for my crawling jobs. Lots of files in many shapes.
My new setup: gen5 ssd in desktop:
My old setup, gen3 ssd in laptop: Both are running pretty much non-stop, very slowly.