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Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs.

PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica’s always willing to geek out over all things related to computing.

Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom’s Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience.

Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she’s always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She’s the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she’s never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you’ll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog.

A NAS is endlessly versatile. You can use it as a simple solution for backups and data storage, or you can evolve it into a full-on homelab, with Docker containers, VMs, media streaming, photo management, and smart home services. That versatility is exactly why it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

In most cases, though, an all-SSD NAS is little more than an expensive way to solve a problem most home users don’t actually have.

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SSDs aren’t always the cheat code to fast transfers in a NAS

The bottleneck is often something else entirely.

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Many people choose an all-SSD NAS for faster file transfers. That’s far from the only benefit of such a NAS (even though I do firmly believe people won’t need it). Most of all, it’s a benefit many people won’t even fully take advantage of.

Unless you’re running on multi-gig (2.5Gb/s and up), big file transfers are limited not by the speed of the drives, but by the speed of the local network (LAN). On 1Gb/s, your best-case ceiling is around 125MB/s theoretical, but more often 110-120MB/s. That means that an NVMe SSD is essentially wasted on it if you’re looking for fast transfers of big files—the SSD will be able to provide more juice than your network can deal with.

Swapping all HDDs out for SSDs won’t remove the obvious network-related roadblock. A single SSD can go a long way in making your whole NAS run significantly better if it’s used as a boot drive and for cache, but for pure storage, HDDs are more cost-efficient.

If you want to make the most of all those SSDs, you’ll also need to switch to multi-gig networking. Going up to 2.5GbE raises the ceiling to a point where SSDs start to matter a bit more, and it’s often considered the sweet spot in a homelab. At 10Gb/s, you’re faced with an additional cost for something that many home users don’t need.

The price per TB math is brutal

Will your all-SSD NAS ever pay off?

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There’s no beating around the bush: An all-SSD NAS can be significantly more expensive than an all-HDD or a hybrid option. And while some may say that SSDs will eventually pay off through their improved power efficiency, how long is that going to take?

The NAS itself doesn’t have to be expensive. We tested the TerraMaster F4 SSD NAS and liked it, and it’s only $348 at the time of writing. But loading it up with NVMe SSDs will still cost you, and the price per terabyte can be staggering when compared to good ol’ HDDs.

Right now, 8TB SSDs can be bought for $800 and up. Some 4TB variants might be more worth your while, with the Crucial P310 priced at $345.

But a Seagate Barracuda 8TB HDD costs just $157. You can even buy a Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB HDD for $500, and that’s a hard drive made specifically for a NAS, which is a much better solution. Achieving that capacity via SSDs means an expense of $2,400, following the current market prices.

Beyond just loading up on SSDs—which you’ll need far more of to reach the same capacity as an HDD can provide—you’ll also have to get more bays or enclosures to house those SSDs. The upfront cost is massive with a sizable all-SSD NAS.

Of course, consumer SSDs aren’t the only option. You can buy special SSDs made for a NAS environment (which cost even more). You can also buy used enterprise SSDs, which tend to offer better endurance and capacity than consumer versions.

The price difference is already massive, but could be getting worse, as SSDs have been experiencing steady price hikes over the last few months. We have AI and enterprise demand to thank for that, along with supply tightening.

HDDs still dominate what most people use a NAS for

I wouldn’t use them in a PC, but I’ll gladly use them in a NAS.

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A casual at-home NAS often just doesn’t need more than an HDD. A single SSD is a great addition, but anything beyond that can be an unnecessary luxury.

Workloads such as backups and data storage perform well with an HDD, as they are more capacity-driven and rely less on latency. Besides, we run into the same reality as before: HDDs can max out a 1Gb/s connection in large file transfers, so unless you upgrade your switch to offer higher throughput, there’s no need to invest thousands of dollars in more SSDs.

HDDs are all but obsolete in any scenario other than this, but in bulk storage, they still shine, and many can keep going for years. Backblaze’s latest report shows that the annualized failure rate (AFR) of its HDDs sits at 1.57% (data for all of 2024). That’s slightly higher than the most recent 2023 SSD report (~0.92%), but not massively so.

When an all-SSD NAS actually makes sense

They’re not bad, they’re just expensive.

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All-SSD NAS builds are fantastic, so there’s no problem with having one, not exactly. The thing is that they’re specialized, expensive, and often unnecessary—but there are times when they’re the best pick.

If you have a multi-gig (2.5Gb/s, or ideally 10Gb/s) network, that removes the bottleneck and lets those SSDs do some serious work. Regardless of the network, SSDs are still better at heavy random I/O. They shine in workloads that are heavily latency-dependent. If you deal with lots of small files, run VMs, containers, and databases, you’ll see clear benefits from the shift to SSDs—at a cost.

Outside of that, many choose to stuff their NAS full of SSDs because of lifestyle factors. Wanting a truly silent NAS, with low temps and no vibration, is a legitimate reason to make the switch.

But if you just want a good place to back up your data? You’re better off with HDDs plus an extra backup device to follow the 3-2-1 rule.

If in doubt, go hybrid

The best of both worlds.

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For most users, a NAS with a mix of HDDs and one or two SSDs is the best way to go. You’re taking the economic approach by getting cheaper bulk storage, but still boosting important workloads with an SSD to make everything run smoother. For most at-home users, this approach is more than good enough.

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Specialized use cases can and do benefit from switching to SSDs, but it’s a huge upfront expense that not everyone needs to consider. Before you jump in, consider what you’re going to do with your NAS and act accordingly.