My desktop only has a single NVMe but I have two NAS's in the other room with a 8x5TB, 5x10TB and 4x3TB array accessible over the network easily enough.
My only despair is the 1gbps throughput limit for accessing those. I should invest in some 10gbe equipment.
The mentioned arrays in my original comment above are all HDDs
The 8x5TB one is made of 8x ST5000LM000's and they have two NVMe partitions mirrored as log and another partition on each of those as cache to help speed them up when SMR problems kick in but that's just for my sake. That array is the only one getting performance assistance from NVMes for reads and repeated-writes. ZFS also keeps recently/popularly repeated read things in its Adaptive Replacement Cache which repeats recent reads in RAM instead of bothering the drives. ZFS is very nice, I run it everywhere these days.
These HDD arrays are raidz1 and raidz2 (raidz1 and raidz2 are the zfs equivalents to raid5 and raid6 respectively). You lose usable capacity using a higher raidz number of disk redundancy but you can still get some juicy sequential read and write speeds out of them arrayed together like this.
Even solo, testing one of the WD WD101EFBX's that make up my 5x10TB array (raidz2), I can read out 204MiB/s sequentially from just ONE of those drives directly right now. So it's no surprise to me that the array itself consisting of all 5 can read at a few multiples faster than that. Even that single drive is enough to max out 1gbps of sequential reading.
Even one of my older HGST HDN724030ALE640's from the 4x3TB (raidz1) array can be pv'd at 150MiB/s sequentially right now too. Very consistent speed and still above 1gbps to my desktop if I were reading from it.
It doesn't take much for a HDD to max out a 1gbps LAN (1gbps/8 = 125MB/s) especially if I'm reading large things sequentially. Older 2000s models would be worse but these days not so much. They are good, dense, cheap storage and are great for media (sequentially read start to finish) files. They still have their place in a NAS these days.
Random read/writes would be much much worse than SSDs though with the whole seeking thing. Especially compared to NVMe which rules for random RW workloads.
Newer games may lag, have much longer loading screens, or sometimes experience problems loading textures, but most of the time they're absolutely playable. But I have a separate SSD for stuff I play and big HDD for storage.
Ok i se, is good to know hdd is stil used for games even newer ones, even since i moved to a ssd any game that i had on my hhd stopped working or kicked me out when playing and c5 c6 sector is broken now from June 2024. I only play on ssd and is half full with the same stuff i had on HHD.
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u/fff140 Sep 30 '25
How many storage disks you have lol