It's a NAS. The N stands for Network. The bottleneck - latency and throughput - is almost certainly going to be the network, unless you're on 10GigE, especially if the NAS has a reasonable amount of RAM as cache.

Counting reads isn't the important thing, it's counting random reads. Most of what you will be reading from the SSD is going to be long contiguous reads of whole files. These are the best case for hard disks. A desktop hard disk can easily do 50-100MB/s in this kind of use, some of them can do more. A desktop SSD will do about 200-250MB/s. When it comes to small random reads, 4KB here, 4KB there, dotted all over the place, the SSD will still do over 50MB/s, often a lot more, while the hard disk speed will be under 1MB/s (theoretical maximum performance for a typical hard drive if every read is accompanied by a seek is around 50-100KB/s).

My phone and one of my ARM laptops both have microSD cards that are semi-permanently installed. They're where most of the data is stored. 32GB of microSD costs about £10 now, so there's lots of space in these devices. Not, admittedly, in comparison to the 4TB RAID-Z array in my NAS, but still more than the total of my hard drives a decade ago...

By your definition, I don't store stuff on my laptop either, since it's all backed up on the NAS.

You say that like they'll be building guns out of steel pipe and ball bearings. But the truth is, making guns in a new caliber and making ammunition to match is easy enough that some hobbyists do it in their garage.

That's making one, or at best a small handful of weapons that will babied on the range. It's cool and all... But it's not building weapons by the gross lot capable of withstanding field conditions, being maintained by the lowest common denominator, etc... That's a very different problem.
 

I Am Not A Military Expert

Yet, that doesn't stop you from pontificating at length.

The Dragon spacecraft is the first vehicle which has been built primarily with private funds, where the "ownership" of the vehicle does not belong to a government agency.

Wrong. There's a whole raft load of satellites on orbit built entirely with private funds, launched on private boosters by private companies, with no "ownership" whatsoever by any government agency.

It is revolutionary from the standpoint that the government didn't lay down the requirements for what they wanted (or just designed the item themselves) in a space vehicle, just ISS interface requirements. SpaceX built what they wanted without NASA or DoD people sticking their noses in.

That's the geek urban legend. And it's utter bullshit.
 
Nothing flies from the Cape that doesn't meet DoD safety requirements and (for commercial flights, of which there are many) FAA requirements. Nothing docks to the ISS that doesn't meet NASA safety requirements. Etc... etc... The DoD, and NASA, and the FAA, and the State Dept, and... well, a whole raftload stuck their noses in.

Are those mutually exclusive options? The industrial revolution resulted in a lot of reforms in the UK, including the beginnings of the process that ended with universal suffrage. It was also a time when the poor were exploited and oppressed, although this time by the upper middle classes rather than (or, more accurately, as well as) the aristocracy. Given the end results, I think most of us living in the countries that benefitted from this process are glad that it did, as well as being glad that we can look back on it as a transitional step. Given the choice, I'd much rather that we had gone straight to a post-scarcity utopia in 1750, but as far as I know no one has yet come up with a way of making that happen...

You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.

Hiring good MS admins is hard too. Possibly harder, because, although there are more, the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.

I actually did see someone using one of them last week, but he was a tango teacher who also DJ'd. If you'd asked me the same question a week ago, I'd have said over a year ago. I rarely see people with stand-alone MP3 players now that a cheap smartphone and a decent sized SD card can be had for about the same price as an MP3 player.