> I’m looking forward to the day that I can retire my spinning-disk NAS, but at $700 per 8TB SSD I think it’s going to be a while before they’re cheap enough that I want to take that leap.
It's not just the price - SSDs are not a good choice for long-term storage, especially if they're not powered up continuously.
In practice, I don't really care about those SSD limitations.
Modern SSDs last long enough that I can cheaply upgrade in 5 years to something else before any of the drives likely fail.
If one or even two drives fail, I'm covered by Raid-Z2.
Continuously powering solid-state drives is really not a big deal. The 10 Gigabit ethernet adapter in my NAS would probably have more idle power draw than 6-8 idle SSDs combined. The entire system barely pulls 20-25W at idle.
I've heard about the same thing, but I have yet to see evidence of this. I have an old SSD on the shelf that I may be power up every 1.5 years or so, and so far, it works fine. It's around 8 years old.
It's not just the price - SSDs are not a good choice for long-term storage, especially if they're not powered up continuously.