Comment by zamadatix

I went all flash for my NAs last round. Here's why:

I found the sustained write concern to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. I went for budget drives, MP34, and the sustained performance of a single drive is still greater than what the maximum performance of a SATA 3 interface a spinning disk would be on. Add on that the random performance at such times is still orders of magnitude better than that plus 2 drives worth sustained writes is enough to saturate a 10G link. Between all that it feels a bit silly to shy away from SSDs just because they are only significantly faster in sustained workloads instead of monumentally faster.

I also found actual tests people have been performing on SSDs have shown no loss on a shelf in 4x-10x that timeframe, not that I plan on buying a NAS and only powering it on once a quarter anyways. Particularly with the power savings and lack of spin time or spin up/spin down cycles or related noise I've just been leaving this one to run 24/7.

The other big benefit I found is spinning disks commonly used in NAS building have write limits that are often worse than the write limits of SSDs. On SSDs there is also no operational concern with the impact of a read workflow https://serverfault.com/questions/582170/limits-on-read-tran... so you can set your pool scrub to occur much more often without lifespan concern.

The cost downside of course remains though. $/GB has only went back up since I built the all flash NAS.