That's basically it. My PC that keeps up (and can sync a month of updates in about an hour) will typically be thrashing an SSD at 55MB/s while using about 15Mbit/s internet.

On an older PC I can't sync, it keeps falling further and further behind. It's got a slow old spinning rust disk.

As a note, I believe the Geth devs have an update coming where they use more memory caching which saves smashing the disk so hard during sync.

The final frontier