He was probably referring to solid state hard drives.

For example 1TB Samsung drives delivered 100 MB/s over 5 years ago. Most 3.5" disks delivered as much.

I was surprised by that, though I shouldn't have been:

I'm getting about 100MB/sec from 3.5" Samsungs, WDs and Seagates today - but you're right according to these 4 year old benchmarks: http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_blue_1tb...

I guess the configuration I'm benchmarking with, and the type of load, which is basically streaming, but from a journaled-but-otherwise-standard ext4, slows me down a little. But the convenience and standardness of this setup is worth more to me than a factor of 2 in performance (that's not my bottleneck at the moment).