The thing is they went from Windows on spinning rust to Linux on an SSD.
* Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD
* Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust
The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.
* Modern windows has a really hard time on spinning rust, they'd have seen extreme performance improvements going to windows on an SSD
* Linux deals better with spinning rust, they'd have seen performance improvements going to linux on spinning rust
The SSD is still going to be most of the performance improvements. The gap between a 5400 HDD and an SSD (even more so NVMe) is just ridiculous on every single metric, there's orders of magnitude differences in throughput (especially on random reads or writes) and even more so latency and concurrency.