Deciding between SSDs and HDDs for your network-attached storage (NAS) can prove challenging if you’re just starting out or are looking to do some upgrades. I’ve considered the move from HDDs to SSDs a few times now, but I always come back to the trusty mechanical hard drive. My reasoning involves costs, capacities, performance, and longevity (depending on workload). Here are some that prevent me from making the switch, though I’m sure I will do eventually.
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You can store more on a hard drive
They typically have higher capacities
Try finding a consumer-grade PCIe or SATA SSD that beats the top-capacity HDD. Go on, I’ll wait for you to return to this browser tab. Finished your search? I bet you came up empty-handed, and that’s because SSD as a technology still hasn’t advanced to the point where you can store more than 16 TB of data on a single drive — at least outside the enterprise sector. There are considerably larger SSDs available for big business, but these cost more than a mortgage deposit and are pointless for a home NAS.
NAS SSDs cap out at around 8 TB from Seagate and Western Digital. Seagate does have the Nytro series with capacities up to 30 TB, but these are expensive and designed for data centers. We’ll have to wait for more years to pass to see such capacities trickle down to the price range most NAS owners can reasonably afford.
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It’s more cost-effective to buy HDDs
You save more up front
That leads me to value. There’s no question that SSDs are more expensive than HDDs, and it’s easy to tell the difference when analyzing the price per GB of capacity. A standard 1 TB NAS HDD costs around $60, which works out to just $0.06 per GB. An SSD designed for home servers will set you back an additional $30 and calculates to about $0.09 per GB. This doesn’t sound too bad, but how about 2 TB? A HDD will set you back $80 and $0.04 per GB, whereas an SSD will cost $170 and $0.09 per GB.
Now factor in the cost of more than one drive since you should be using RAID, and that works out to quite the investment. An HDD offers better value than an SDD, especially for big storage, and that doesn’t look like it’ll change anytime soon.
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SSDs don’t provide faster speeds
They do, but they also don’t
A PCIe SSD is lightning fast compared to a SATA hard drive, but a SATA SSD is about the same. If you can rely on PCIe storage for your NAS data, you’ll then be limited by PCI lanes on the CPU and network stack with the available ports. If your all-SSD NAS only has a single 1Gb port, you’re going to have a hard time taking advantage of all that additional bandwidth from the storage medium. A single HDD can fully saturate this connection, making it a pointless upgrade unless you can fully take advantage.
Even with a 2.5Gb home network, I don’t see any positives from moving to SSDs. Sure, they could last longer if I don’t write as much data and use them for primarily reading off the storage pool for services, but even then, it’ll still be a costly switch. Not only do you need to fork out for expensive PCIe drives, but also hardware to fully utilize them, and then more SSDs to compensate for the lower capacities. It’s simply not worth it if you’re already established with HDDs like my own setup.
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Hard drives can handle more data writing
SSDs have a finite lifespan measured in total writes
Every drive will eventually fail. It’s as inevitable as any living being. Your SSD will eventually cease to perform as designed due to the aging parts and number of total drive writes, whereas a mechanical hard drive will fail once the platters stop spinning or the head cannot read and write data. What a hard drive can do is handle much higher write loads over time. An SSD lifespan is largely measured by the total bytes written to the modules, with many SSDs having specified limits the manufacturer expects when issues should start to occur.
A hard drive will keep running no matter how many TBs of data are written to its platters daily. Hitting the drive harder will cause more wear on specific components, but you should be able to store and write a lot of data to your NAS-grade drive before it starts to fail. I generally like to use the NAS for daily backups from multiple devices, so higher total writes can come in handy. They also work better in the surveillance footage recorder where we write a lot of data daily.
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That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy NAS SSDs
More SSD-only NAS enclosures are being released from top brands, such as TerraMaster and Asustor. The price of SSDs has dropped considerably over the years, but it’s still not quite at the same level as hard drives for value and cost per GB of capacity. SSDs do have their benefits, however. They use less power, don’t cause noise, don’t vibrate, are considerably faster, and have no moving parts, so they should last longer if you don’t write too much data.
Whether a hard drive or an SSD is the right option for your NAS depends on your needs and requirements. I’m still good with HDDs inside my NAS, while all my servers and other hardware run on flash storage. The best of both worlds!
