new hd's are not slow. 4tb seagate is 180mbps r/w. i use a small ssd for boot drive.
New hdd's are VERY slow, every single part of "ssd" performance, and what makes ssd's seem fast, booting, application opening, ultra responsiveness is from, latency and 4kb read/writes, a new 4tb Seagate is still in the 13-18ms latency range, vs WELL below 1ns for SSD's, and in the range of 0.5-1.5 4kb random read/writes, where the latest ssd's will be along the lines of 30-40mb's read's and even higher writes.
Sequential speeds of ssd's even up to 2 years ago wasn't very impressive vs hdd's, 130-140mb's sequential speeds on hdd's vs 90mb's on the first ssd's, 170mb's for a couple years after that wasn't impressive, it was all in the latency and random read/write performance, HDD's are magnitudes behind in those key area's and haven't moved on at all, SSD's have extended the lead in the ultra slow area's and sequential read/writes have now trebled over HDD's, while years ago they weren't even faster, but slower in that area. The gap is extending by a pretty big margin each and every year now.
From
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_4tb_barracuda_xt_first_thoughts_review
We measured sequential file transfer speeds at 140.2 MB/s read and 133.8 MB/s write using 2MB transfers in IOMeter. Those speeds slowed to 48.3 MB/s read and 40.2 MB/s write with 2MB random transfers.
Moving to 4K random transfers, we measured speeds of 45 IOPS read 94 IOPS write or 0.176 MB/s and 0.366 MB/s respectively. These values came up shy of what we measured on the 3TB XT, although its comparing a full production model to an unannounced and otherwise unreleased drive.
Using CrystalDiskMark to measure performance of the inside versus the outside edge of the platters, we found the speed to be a bit higher than what IOMeter saw on the top end. This could be explained by IOMeter looking at a broader section of the drive, where our forced inner/outer test only looks at the outermost or innermost edges for best or worst case performance.
On the outer tracks of the 4TB Barracuda XT we found speeds measuring 188.6 MB/s read and 187.5 MB/s write. These values slowed to just 88.82 MB/s read and 88.71 MB/s write on the inner portion of the drive.
Performance is very poor, random performance hasn't increased in really, 7-8 years, sequential has gone up marginally, and the inner tracks haven't gone up much at all, average performance is up a very small amount.
SSD's can do sequential 550mb/s reads and 450mb/s writes across the entire drive, with no slow down, random 2mb performance is basically the same, where hdd's drop to 1/4 of the performance if that, 4kb performance on hdd's drops to sub 1mb/s, while ssd's only drop to 30mb's read's, 70-80kb's writes. With higher queue depth on ssd's you can dramatically increase random 4kb read/write back towards top performance while on hdd's it makes next to no difference.
They do cost a lot, obviously, but you get massively better performance, you're talking about 100 times the random read/write performance, actually in writes its more like 200 times the performance, 4 times the sequential performance, instant access, etc, etc. Its also far to say cheaper ssd's and smaller ssd's drop performance significantly vs 240gb models, however, even the slowest 60gb ssd drives still absolutely blow away HDD performance.