The thing is, computers with SSDs feel about as fast as computers were with HDDs 12 years ago. Some apps still take 10 seconds or more to load on brand new hardware in 2021. There shouldn't be any random wait times in daily usage.

Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster.

It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.

I’d love find some hardware along with period-appropriate software and run tests to debunk or support your idea. I still just don’t buy it, but it’s hard to find quantitative evidence without just going out and trying it.

By the way, 10 seconds clocked on a stopwatch is a ridiculously long time. Almost no apps open that slowly, in 2009 or 2021.

You actually need 2x whatever you have if you want to still have it if the drive its in dies or the data is destroyed by malice or mischance. Say you have 3TB of data now and may acquire more later. Your cheapest SSD option I see for sale on newegg.com is 4TB for $322. Going all SSD all the time requires one to spend $644.

Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.

I still use them for NAS use because you get a bit of "notice" before the data goes down, and costs at this level makes spinning disks make sense.