Considering their raison d'être is to retain backups and facilitate file transfers, Network-Attached Storage rigs may not seem all that formidable to a fledgling home server enthusiast. However, the NAS rabbit hole goes pretty deep, with different hardware, OS, and drive combos offering entirely distinct sets of storage features.

Take all-SSD NAS devices, for example. Unlike conventional HDD-only servers, all-flash rigs tend to rely solely on SSDs – often requiring high-speed NVMe drives instead of their (comparatively) slower counterparts. While they aren’t the best for archiving massive volumes of data, SSD-only storage servers are fairly useful in home lab environments.

Fast transfer speeds make them perfect for intensive operations

Sharing files, storing VM data, housing clusters, you name it!

If you’ve ever dealt with an HDD-only server, you’re probably familiar with slow transfer speeds. With RAID 1, RAID 5 (or RAID-Z1, if you prefer the ZFS implementation as I do), RAID 6/RAID-Z2, and other slower RAID levels, file transfer operations involving mechanical hard drives can take an eternity. Likewise, HDDs are far from ideal for demanding tasks where you’ll need responsiveness over all else. Since my mini-PCs have limited storage options, I’ve previously used an iSCSI share on my HDD-only NAS unit to store GUI-heavy virtual machines, including a Windows 11 dev VM. Unfortunately, the experience was so sluggish that I ended up ditching the project altogether.

SSDs, on the other hand, are fast enough to serve as boot drives for virtual machines. I’ve currently hooked several Proxmox virtual machines up to iSCSI shares on my all-SSD NAS, and while they’d be a bit faster if I could use NVMe drives directly on my server rigs, the experience is a lot smoother – even on mere 2.5G network speeds. With modern NAS rigs being powerful enough to run a handful of containers, you can even host Nextcloud, Cosmos, and other local services that require fast transfer speeds directly on your all-SSD NAS.

I’ve also dealt with high-availability Proxmox clusters relying on SSD shares for a distributed storage setup, and the nodes worked flawlessly as long as the underlying network speeds were good enough.

All-SSD NAS devices are fairly compact and make less noise

Your power bills won’t take a hit, either

Aside from their fast transfer speeds, NAS systems that rely solely on SSDs tend to have smaller footprints than their bulky hard drive-powered counterparts. After all, you don’t need ginormous 3.5-inch drive bays just to house M.2 2230 SSDs. I’ve got three all-SSD NAS devices on me, and since their footprint is way smaller than that of conventional HDD-only servers, I can fit them anywhere in my home lab without making extra space for the chassis.

The quiet nature of all-flash NAS is also worth mentioning. Unlike HDDs that hum at idle loads and screech when the file transfer operations get intense, NVMe drives remain silent regardless of the workload. As long as your CPU fans can keep your NAS’ processor adequately cool, your all-flash storage server won’t turn your room into a jet engine even under hardcore home lab operations.

And for folks worried about the power consumption of adding a NAS to the mix, you can rest assured knowing that an SSD-only storage server won’t contribute too much to your energy bills. Leaving power-hungry PCIe Gen 5 drives out of the mix, your average NAS-grade NVMe SSD won’t consume as much electricity as an energy-guzzling HDD at peak wattages. And when it comes to idle power consumption, you’re looking at stats that are measured in decimal values!

Just don’t use an SSD-only NAS as your primary backup source

And check its PCIe specs and network capabilities before you bring out your wallet

As much as I adore all-flash NAS servers, this article wouldn’t be complete unless I went over their drawbacks and scenarios where you’d want to stick with their HDD-only counterparts. While they’re great for housing virtual machine data and can serve as amazing block storage providers for your cluster nodes, all-SSD NAS units aren’t useful for data archival. Between their limited write cycles, tendency to lose data over time, and high prices, it’s always better to stick with rigs that rely on hard drives to store essential data. If you’re looking for a server that’s responsible for handling backups and storing important data, it’s a good idea to use bulky HDD-only (or better yet, hybrid) NAS devices.

I’ve also noticed this weird quirk in budget-friendly NAS units, where the manufacturers fumble on the PCIe lanes and network port aspects. For example, it’s possible for a cheap NAS to ship with four drive bays and only one PCIe Gen 3 lane per SSD. That’s going to lower the max speeds of your NVMe drive to 1GB/s. Heck, having dealt with such devices, I can confirm that the actual speeds lie in the upper 800MB/s range. That’s not really a deal-breaker, as even a 10G port can only hit 1250MB/s in max theoretical transfer speeds. Unfortunately, cheap all-flash NAS units tend to ship with 5G or even 2.5G network ports, which can massively throttle your SSD speeds.

As long as you conduct thorough research, an all-SSD storage server can become a reliable addition to your home lab, even more so if you’ve got cluster nodes that require a high-speed centralized storage machine.