In 2010 I got my first taste of SSDs after I bought one for an ageing laptop and it was the single most impactful hardware upgrade I can recall experiencing. I think I was following Engadget at the time, and probably caught wind of the idea from there, convinced enough to part with a shocking $2/gb. In any case, I was blown away. I remember excitedly showing people (who could not care less) that I could click on every application as fast as I could, and they would simply pop open. Photoshop + high res photos open in seconds was unbelievable, gone were the days of getting coffee after starting something up. Crysis levels took around 10s. I was delighted by ~250mb/s. Nowadays fast drives are ~6gb/s, with pcie5 promises of ~15gb/s for something like ~$0.50/gb. The enthusiast hardware is 60x faster than it was.
As for the more common consumer side, maybe consoles?
The Nintendo switch 2 just launched with internal memory access at something like 2gb/s and external memory support for memory cards that support 1gb/s. In 2010 you could get the New 3DS and enjoy ~4mb/s on the micro SD card as the nand was mostly inaccessible. So that's a cool ~250x faster. Some games released on both switch and n3ds (e.g. Monster Hunter XX), so it should even be possible to compare load times!
More even, for storage at least.
In 2010 I got my first taste of SSDs after I bought one for an ageing laptop and it was the single most impactful hardware upgrade I can recall experiencing. I think I was following Engadget at the time, and probably caught wind of the idea from there, convinced enough to part with a shocking $2/gb. In any case, I was blown away. I remember excitedly showing people (who could not care less) that I could click on every application as fast as I could, and they would simply pop open. Photoshop + high res photos open in seconds was unbelievable, gone were the days of getting coffee after starting something up. Crysis levels took around 10s. I was delighted by ~250mb/s. Nowadays fast drives are ~6gb/s, with pcie5 promises of ~15gb/s for something like ~$0.50/gb. The enthusiast hardware is 60x faster than it was.
As for the more common consumer side, maybe consoles? The Nintendo switch 2 just launched with internal memory access at something like 2gb/s and external memory support for memory cards that support 1gb/s. In 2010 you could get the New 3DS and enjoy ~4mb/s on the micro SD card as the nand was mostly inaccessible. So that's a cool ~250x faster. Some games released on both switch and n3ds (e.g. Monster Hunter XX), so it should even be possible to compare load times!