The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I’d put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD’s write cache is saturated. That’s not even comparing like-for-like – consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.
There’s absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that’s not likely to change for quite a few years yet.
The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I’d put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD’s write cache is saturated. That’s not even comparing like-for-like – consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.
There’s absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that’s not likely to change for quite a few years yet.