100%. This is why when I ordered my home NAS I pick 5400RPM NAS drives (FreeNAS Mini). The WD Red drives in my current system have been spinning since 2014, 4x4TB in a mirrored stripped set for a whopping 8TB of space + 2x120GB Evo write caches (mirrored).
The key to speed is having lots of drives, RAM and SSD write cache.
I plan on getting the new TrueNAS Mini XL this year with 8x14TB.
Hey, I'm building a computer with lots of storage, you sound like someone who knows what they're doing... maybe you could help me... currently the plan is:
3x Firecuda 4tb NVME
2x QVO 8tb SATA SSD
4x WD Ultrastar 18tb.
My use case is I need tons of storage that operates fast and is used for all sorts of things (creative work, gaming, archiving, job processing), sometimes all at the same time. It's a threadripper pro workstation pc, so I have spare PCIE slots to upgrade later.
I'm thinking of replacing a couple of the QVO SSDs with Ultrastars and using a couple of the FireCudas as cache drives for the platter drives. Good idea or bad idea? Would I be making a meaningful tradeoff or should I just go for the extra space?
Depends on what OS you are running. In my case I am using TrueNAS so it is made for being a NAS and you can just tell it, hey here is a cache, here is a log drive, etc.
If you are talking about local storage for a workstation then I am not sure. Depends on your workflow. If you have a "work on this on the fast stuff, then when I am done I can move it to the spinning rust" then you might want to figure out largest project size for fast vs long term storage of the projects.
The key to speed is having lots of drives, RAM and SSD write cache.
I plan on getting the new TrueNAS Mini XL this year with 8x14TB.