I didn't say "no difference", but for a 10x difference in read speed, only a 15% decrease is not a major one.
Yeah, I know, my game is currently installed on SSD, not an HDD.
Well, looks like I have over 100 mods actually, now it's 138. My specs are: I7-4980HQ, 16gb ram, GTX1070, adata sx8200 ssd. I've played many heavily modded games before (factorio and skyrim, for example) and never had encountered such long loading times.