Nimble Storage Inc. is making a pretty good case for moving from disks to flash storage with a new survey that reveals that business users lose about 10 percent of their day just waiting for programs to load.

The ‘Mind the Gap’ report, which Nimble commissioned Oxford Economics Ltd. to produce, found that delays in propagating and refreshing application data results in up to $7.5 billion of lost work time each year.

Nimble/Oxford surveyed nearly 3,000 IT professionals and business application users in the U.S. Europe and Southeast Asia. Nearly two-thirds of all respondents and 76 percent of U.S. respondents said that slow applications significantly impact their ability to perform their best in the workplace.

Frustration thresholds varied by age, with more than three-quarters of millennials saying that application performance hurts their productivity compared with only half of baby boomers. Half of the millennials surveyed said they’ve stopped using an application for this reason – significantly more than users in other age groups.

A generation whose expectations have been shaped by lickety-split experiences like mobile apps and gaining platforms has less patience than those who remember floppy disk drives. It’s a lesson IT professionals should keep in mind, since millennials are already the single largest component of the U.S. workforce.

But there’s evidence that IT is actually pretty clueless about the problem. While more than 40 percent of business users said they avoid using some software applications at work because of performance problems, only 18 percent of IT professionals believe it’s an issue. Over 70 percent of users said they experience at least some delays, and 28 percent said slowdowns happen “all the time.” Over half said they’re less tolerant of performance problems than they were five years ago.

Regionally, U.S. and Southeast Asian users had the highest performance expectations, while European users were the most tolerant.

Not surprisingly, the results dovetail with the value proposition for Nimble’s Predictive Flash platform, which applies predictive analytics and flash storage to optimize performance. Nimble could use a boost; its stock has fallen by two-thirds since October on the heels of disappointing earnings results and forecasts. The company faces several class-action lawsuits over its stock performance.