At least hard drives still have decent seek times. Load time optimization for consoles with optical drives was another league: a single seek across the disk could lead to waiting a second longer on the loading screen.
Of course, the CD-ROM only spins in one direction however. Crash Bandicoot programmers solved this issue by making it impossible to run backwards in the game.
The game was basically one dimensional on purpose: you can only run forward, and never backwards, to optimize the CD-ROM bandwidth. Still, the game was groundbreaking, the gameplay and characters fresh. Its an incredible technical achievement, to the point where most people didn't even realize that running backwards was a technical hurdle they felt like not solving.
I've been playing crash since I was a kid, and I never thought about why you couldn't run backwards. What a brilliant solution.