Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget)

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Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget) | Jeff Geerling

www.jeffgeerling.com

Fun writeup;

I just finished an all-in-one mac pro replacement, where I keep everything in one box, which suits my simple-minded view of a personal photo workstation and media server.

But by the end of my build I realized the servethehome way of thinking is on the better track, with 10Gb enet allowing a modular break between mass storage and the desktop, and moving the storage towards linux boxes with more sophisticated file systems.

For anyone getting into video, I'm sure this is the right long-term way to approach a build: Apple knows this too just looking at the Mini and Studio vs. languishing Mac Pro.

Once you face the split of mass storage into a network module, can enjoy truly meaningful system performance gains as engineers continue to pump up the ethernet, or whatever networking comes next.

Apple's weak link looks like Thunderbolt: it's doomed to remain USB+ due to short cables, fragile connectors, and no compelling need to attach graphics to a external bus.

Thunderbolt has not improved anything at all.

And when even a $100 NVMe drive has an ARM Cortex running it, the idea of a "CPU" has become weird. Everything has a CPU, therefore nothing is a CPU.

The time is hugely overripe for the PC to be reinvented.