As a piece of anecdata: I run a Bitcoin node at home with no troubles, but I've been totally unable to sync the Ethereum chain. Trying to do so drags my computer to its knees for hours and doesn't seem to be making very much progress.
I gave up trying to run geth and switched to parity instead. It works, for now, but it takes longer and longer to catch up each time (I only run it occasionally for metamask).
That's basically it. My PC that keeps up (and can sync a month of updates in about an hour) will typically be thrashing an SSD at 55MB/s while using about 15Mbit/s internet.
On an older PC I can't sync, it keeps falling further and further behind. It's got a slow old spinning rust disk.
As a note, I believe the Geth devs have an update coming where they use more memory caching which saves smashing the disk so hard during sync.
