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Deciding between SSD and HDD for your network attached storage (NAS) can be challenging if you’re just starting out or looking to make some upgrades. I’ve considered upgrading from HDD to SSD several times, but I always come back to the trusty mechanical hard drive. My reasoning involves costs, capabilities, performance, and longevity (depending on workload). Here are a few that are holding me back from making the switch, although I’m sure I will eventually.
You can store more on a hard drive
They usually have greater capabilities.
Try to find a consumer PCIe or SATA SSD that outperforms the highest capacity HDD. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you to return to this browser tab. Is your search over? I bet you came up empty-handed, and that’s because SSD as a technology hasn’t yet advanced to the point where you can store more than 16TB of data on a single drive, at least outside of the enterprise sector. There are considerably larger SSDs available for large businesses, but they cost more than a mortgage deposit and don’t make sense for a home NAS.
NAS SSDs cap out at around 8TB from Seagate and Western Digital. Seagate has the Nytro series with capacities up to 30TB, but they are expensive and designed for data centers. We’ll have to wait for more years to see those capabilities reach the price range that most NAS owners can reasonably afford.
It is more profitable to buy hard drives
You save more in advance
That leads me to value. There is no doubt that SSDs are more expensive than HDDs and it is easy to tell the difference when looking at the price per GB of capacity. A standard 1TB NAS hard drive It costs around $60, which is just $0.06 per GB. An SSD designed for home servers will cost you an additional $30 and works out to about $0.09 per GB. This doesn’t sound too bad, but how about 2 TB? An HDD will cost you $80 and $0.04 per GB, while an SSD will cost $170 and $0.09 per GB.
Now factor in the cost of more than one drive, since you would have to use RAID, and that amounts to a considerable investment. An HDD offers better value than an SDD, especially for large storage, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon.
SSDs do not provide faster speeds
They do it, but they don’t do it either.
A PCIe SSD is incredibly fast compared to a SATA hard drive, but a SATA SSD is more or less the same. If you can rely on PCIe storage for your NAS data, you will be limited by the PCI lanes in the CPU and network stack with available ports. If your all-SSD NAS only has a 1Gb port, you’ll have a hard time taking advantage of all that extra bandwidth from the storage media. A single hard drive can completely saturate this connection, making it a useless upgrade unless you can take full advantage of it.
Even with a 2.5Gb home network, I don’t see any benefit in moving to SSD. Sure, they might last longer if I don’t write as much data and use it primarily to read from the storage pool for services, but even then, it’ll still be an expensive upgrade. Not only do you need to shell out for expensive PCIe drives, but also hardware to fully utilize them, and then more SSDs to compensate for the lower capacities. It’s just not worth it if you’re already established with hard drives like mine.
Hard drives can support more data writing
SSDs have a finite lifespan measured in total writes
Every drive will eventually fail. It is as inevitable as any living being. Your SSD will eventually stop working as designed due to outdated parts and the sheer number of writes to the drive, while a mechanical hard drive will fail once the platters stop spinning or the head cannot read or write data. What a hard drive can do is handle much higher write loads over time. The lifespan of an SSD is largely measured by the total bytes written to the modules, and many SSDs have specific limits that the manufacturer expects when problems should start to occur.
A hard drive will continue to function no matter how many TB 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 drive before it starts to fail. I generally like to use the NAS for daily backups from multiple devices, so a higher write total can be helpful. They also work better on surveillance image recorder, where we write a lot of data daily.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy SSD NAS
Top brands, like TerraMaster and Asustor, are launching more SSD-only NAS enclosures. The price of SSDs has dropped considerably over the years, but they are still not on the same level as hard drives in terms of value and cost per GB of capacity. However, SSDs have their advantages. They consume less power, make no 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 SSD is the right choice for your NAS depends on your needs and requirements. I’m still good with hard drives inside my NAS, while all my servers and other hardware run on flash storage. The best of both worlds!
