The difficulty with this theory is that typical user experience, including start times, is based on disk access alone and all SSDs are in the area of .01-.02ms making it virtually impossible to measure. We don’t evaluate start times as a comparable factor because we can get any SSD to boot to screen in 7-8 seconds.

”
Even start times and system responsiveness are mediocre indicators of performance ”

A users judges performance on start times and responsiveness, this “is” the indicator for the user. Then from that angle, the promotion of an SSD should be on IOPS, not linear transfer.

But a side point would be that the criteria of performance is always from some perspective, for example if the SSD were a paper weight then I would judge weight as a performance indicator. In this case, computer responsivness and snappiness are what is important so this makes IOPs the performance indicator.

The highest numbers sell SSDs period. Even start times and system responsiveness are mediocre indicators of performance as they are so susceptible to affect from the OS and other hardware. In my opinion, some manufacturers have it right by making both compressible and incompressible data results transparent.