Well, I have a few comments. - It is true that a modern HDD has over 120 MBps sequential read, but not by much: 4GiB WD Reds are probably somewhere around 150-

Well, I have a few comments. - It is true that a modern HDD has over 120 MBps sequential read, but not by much: 4GiB WD Reds are probably somewhere around 150-160 MB/s. - Sequential speeds aren’t really that practically useful for me. While I do have some large files, most workloads are going to involve smaller files and a lot more seeking. - When using a filesystem with parity, like btrfs or zfs, you definitely have some overhead for writing and checking parity. I’m sure it’s still very fast, but it is overhead, and NASes don’t tend to be the most cutting edge compute boxes. - Even if some RAID configurations might improve performance, the configuration I am using has a fair bit of overhead. I suspect you need something like RAID 0 or 10 for maximum performance, but those setups are inflexible compared to RAIDZ or Synology SHR. - As it is now, my NAS is unable to saturate the network bandwidth using Samba alone. It just never reaches a gigabit. Part of this is probably related to Samba or the CIFS protocol, but honestly I don’t know if it has the raw CPU muscle. All in all, I am not too concerned about it. It is possible that I could yield better performance with 10 GbE, but I don’t think it would matter for most of my use cases. Plus, disk resources are definitely being consumed by background tasks as it is.