alt Hacker NewsThe successor is SSDs, and I think for what Apple was using fusion drives for they are worthy successors.
The 2.5” form factor also took up a ton of space in a laptop form factor.
With my NAS box (TrueNAS ZFS) I don’t bother with a cache. I struggle to justify the cost/benefit ratio. The sustained write speed of a 3.5” disk isn’t so bad for the most common NAS use cases.
If I could go back to 2024 I think I’d use a m.2 2280 array for my NAS just because my present tense brain would think it was cheap. I don’t even hoard that much content so 4-8TB would be fine.
Maybe one of these nifty things would be fun: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
From a pure cost point of view, I think it still makes sense to me to split the load, like 500GB of NVMe covers your containers and apps and stuff, but then 10-20TB of spinning storage is fairly achievable with redundancy, whereas that would cost a fortune to do as all solid state.
The case I have is a Jonsbo N2, which works great for accommodating 5 3.5" drives with backplane, a mini-ITX mobo: https://www.amazon.ca/N2-Aluminum-Support-Integrated-Removab...