I’m pondering swapping out the HDDs in my trusty 15-year old NAS for SSDs. Partly because I’m assured it’ll make it all quieter and partly because… well, it’s nice to have a project. Plus I might then upgrade the NAS enclosure to something fanless and it should all be silent.

Looking around, WD’s Red SSDs are apparently the ‘best SSD for a NAS’ (SATA), but they’re significantly more expensive than other well-regarded SSDs (Samsung 860/870, for example). Question is: in the SATA SSD space, is there much difference between SSDs that are ‘good for a NAS’ and other decent SSDs?

is there much difference between SSDs that are ‘good for a NAS’ and other decent SSDs?

I think the key thing here is how much of a hammering are you going to be giving the drives, if they are going to be battered by reads and writes 24/7 by multiple users, like a file server in a busniess environment, or will it be used more as a home media storage device for one or two people?

If the latter, I’d hazard its not worth paying a premium over regular, decent SSD drives.

If you can stand to watch this, they talk about the use of SSDs in NAS servers compared to “normal” SSDs.

NAS SSD

This video is good, just skip straight to 29mins if you want the summary rather than all the analysis.