I admin a datacenter and hard drives are never going anywhere. Same with tapes.
Microsoft has already proven that underwater data centers are viable - they just need to scale up now
Project Natick Phase 2 - https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
Work for one of the largest and we literally finished phasing out tape this year lol.
I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they’re used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.
Not much point in using SSDs in a NAS if it’s there just for holding your files
If the NAS supports tiered storage, you benefit from high I/O performance for things like video editing.
My home storage is a NAS connected over 10GbE, I never bothered trying to play games off of it, but I’ll bet they’d run great. Read & write over the network at 10 gigabit is faster on a machine with (separate) RAID arrays of SSDs and HDDs than internal SATA3 connectivity which is kind of bonkers for a home user. Plus that has virtual machines and cloud backups running on the NAS side.
Lower power usage and smaller and maaaaaaaaybe better reliability. I’d probably do it if it was cost competitive… but it’s not yet.
