Agreed regarding loading times. If I cared, I wouldn't be booting off a RAID, which I've been doing for the better part of eight years.
I also agree that the HDD side of things isn't moving all that fast. Other than some decent size options now, I'd still look to some sort of RAID as 1) no way would I put 8TB of data on a single disk and 2) single drive performance is crap, relatively speaking.
I can work with lots of little files (audio) or lots of large (photos or videos). While having a seperate SSD as cache is all good, it's extra HW that I don't necessarily have the room for and simply don't want that. I'd rather have a
In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? No, or at least probably not. But as NV memory has become pretty cheap, I don't see this 8GB cache staying for long.