For NVMe in particular you will have a hard time filling their queues. Your perceived performance is mostly latency, as there is hardly an application that can submit enough concurrent requests.

With training runs it makes a little beat and you can tell when it checkpoints because there’s a little skip. Or a GPU drops off the bus…

The drives were numerous (hard, floppy, tape, optical), and the noises were too loud to avoid using diagnostically. Printers clacked and whooshed (and sometimes moved furniture). Scanners sang songs. Monitors produced clicks and pops and buzzes and sizzles, and the flyback transformer would continuously whine at different frequencies depending on mode. Modems made dialing and shrieking noises. Sound cards were anything but silent; a person could hear noises that varied based on the work the system was doing. And for a long while, CPUs and/or front side bus speeds put a lot of noise right in the middle of the FM dial.

Computing is pretty quiet these days.

I sometimes think about what a modern analogy would be for some of the operations work I do — translate a graph of status codes into a steady hum at 440hz for 200s, then cacophonous jolts as the 500s start to arrive? As you mentioned, no perfect analogy as you get farther and farther from moving parts.

Luckily, storage also get incredibly cheap, so instead of diagnosing it's easier to just have a full backup of your data, and swap to it in case something goes wrong.