Am I crazy? NAS / Game Streaming PC

I’m a bit consistently annoyed with the sporadic HDD performance in my NAS (SMR drives…) where the write speed varies largely, even with 8 drives and barely pushes past 100MB/s. I’m also tired of having to replace drives every so often, even though my workload is mostly write-once read-many. I also have been living the low power laptop-only life for a while now, and would like to get back into gaming more.

I’m thinking of rebuilding my NAS with SATA SSDs, in a nice compact case that will have space for a GPU so once those aren’t crazy in price, I can install it and use it in a KVM VM with PCIe passthrough.

Am I crazy for pursuing this? My parts list thus far is below.

Motherboard: ASRock Rack > X570D4I-2T
CPU: AMD 3600
RAM: 4x 32GB ECC SODIMM (128GB)
Case: Fractal Design Core 500 Black Mini-ITX Small Form Factor Computer Case - Newegg.com
Boot SSD - partially allocated for a Windows gaming VM: https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Maximum-Performance-SB-RKTQ4-4TB/dp/B08D29JQ24?th=1
NAS SSD Cage: ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB998IP-B Rugged Full Metal 8 Bay 2.5" SAS/SATA SSD&HDD (7mm) Backplane Cage for External 5.25" Bay - Newegg.com
NAS SSDs: 8x Crucial BX 2TB
Extra Cables: 2x Oculink 4i to mini-SAS cables
GPU: ??? 3070 maybe when they’re affordable

The only part that’s sketch AF, in my opinion, is the use of those drives. They’re one of the cheapest if not the cheapest model they make. Honestly I wouldn’t trust them to reliably hold my data. If you’re not planning on having your array full for most of it’s life you could get Samsung 850/860 Evo for the same price. Since they got updated to the 870 Evo you might find them at a decent deal.

If your NAS is mostly write few-read many, check for 1.92/3.84TB Samsung PM863a SSDs or some other older enterprise SSD. Generally a lot more drive writes and are designed for this use case. The Crucial BX 2TB are DRAM-less SSDs and will wear out much quicker

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  1. SMR drives are terrible. Just spend the extra on CMR drives and call it a day.
  2. The 100Mb/s… are you sure that that isn’t just a network bottleneck? Especially if you are using laptops to transfer you files to and from it may just be that you are limited to gigabit Ethernet speeds or Wifi.
  3. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer the separation of responsibilities in my machines. If I want a NAS, I build with reliable power efficient components and leave it running all the time. If I want a gaming rig or work station, I build it up for performance (all else be damned) and turn it on when I’m using it. An all-in-one solution is rarely the best idea and downtime to repair one inevitably means downtime for the other.
  4. You sound like you already have a NAS so why not just upgrade that hardware now and start to save the rest of the money for a gaming rig when GPUs come down in price.
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There is nothing wrong with the BX. Over all, you same about 100USD by using those over the MX. I use MX for the Desktops and NAS and the BX for the Laptops.

If OP wants max throughput while getting the benefits of using Crucial drives, then yeah, go with the MX line, but seems that there is more of an issue with the NAS setup not being able to saturate the network connection.

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