Fair call about "Dell XPS 13". I've now clarified in the article (it's a recent 2022 Dell XPS 13 Plus).
Regarding OS caching: I'm trying to avoid this by clearing caches with the "sysctl vm.drop_caches=3" command. Note that I show both cached and uncached numbers.
It would still be good to call out the exact processor model, as the lowest end i5-1240P has half the L3 cache as the highest i7-1280P.
Also I don't think it was clear you were running "sysctl vm.drop_caches=3" between benchmarking runs of your optimizations. Your table seemed to indicate those were generic initial read/write benchmarks from either dd or hardparm. The site you linked to also had comments on it stating dd is not very good for benchmarking, suggesting fio & a different site[1].
Regarding OS caching: I'm trying to avoid this by clearing caches with the "sysctl vm.drop_caches=3" command. Note that I show both cached and uncached numbers.