Yes yes yes. The feeling you get from a good SSD is largely due to reduced IO latency (both read and write). The ability to absorb random writes (to a degree)

Yes yes yes. The feeling you get from a good SSD is largely due to reduced IO latency (both read and write). The ability to absorb random writes (to a degree) is huge too. It's why the 2008-vintage Intel X25-M caught the industry by surprise. Other SSDs at the time had extremely poor random write latencies. Bandwidth is secondary, unless you are talking about an enterprise/database deployment (where queue depth is deep and you want great bandwidth and latency). Pedants will note that bandwidth and latency are related (see Little's Law).