It's definitely exciting to see a big leap in performance for storage - especially once we start to see M.2 drives using NVMe so we can have lightning-fast boot drives right on the motherboard. (
Intel recently added NVMe support to the NUC which uses M.2 - so it's happening)
But at the same time, I bought the first and second-gen Intel SATA2 drives, the fastest first-gen SATA3 drives, and then recently an enterprise-grade 512GB SanDisk, and I never saw much of an improvement from any of these upgrades, compared to what I saw by moving applications off HDDs and onto any form of SSD.
Faster drives bench really well, but even if you try using a RAM Disk (much quicker than an NVMe drive) there's very little real-world performance improvement when you look at things like app launch times or game load times. transfer speed generally isn't the bottleneck any more with a decent SATA3 drive for much beyond file transfers between two SSDs.
I'd be a lot more excited at affordable drives with higher capacities (say 4TB+) so that I can start replacing hot, loud, and slow HDDs with an SSD, than ones which are 10x faster. Dealing with storage for large files is where I'm running into I/O limitations now.
The current prices for higher capacity SSDs are just ridiculous. Less ridiculous than they used to be, but it doesn't make sense to pay £400 for a 1TB SSD when I can get 16TB for the same price with those new Seagate HDDs.
Sure, not everyone needs 16TB of storage, but even if it was just for a gaming rig, 1TB would only store a fraction of my Steam library alone - especially with more and more games being 50GB downloads these days.
Most of the people that I know who are waiting to upgrade their SSDs are looking for something bigger, rather than something faster. Even though the prices are beginning to drop, 1TB just isn't enough to justify the cost of upgrading.
Now if Intel were to upgrade SRT from only using a 64GB cache to allowing 1TB and beyond, then it makes these big, though not big enough, SSDs a lot more attractive. 1TB is enough that
most of what you'll want to use will already be cached on the drive and you'll get full SSD speeds, but you won't have to constantly be managing what files are/aren't on the drive.
Is that going to be the future for SSDs? Outside of enterprise-level drives that cost £5000+ we seem to have been stuck at 1TB for a while now.