any efficiency gain outside a bottleneck doesn’t effect the end result at all: if you make things more efficient before the bottleneck, things just pile up before; if you make things more efficient after the bottleneck your resources are just waiting for work
in the context of storage, this means that if you don’t have hardware capable of using the data provided by the storage controller, or flash capable of feeding it then really there’s no point in having it
battery efficiency is of course cumulative, but as the author points out… meh; this is a drop in the ocean