Why this $45 upgrade was the best money spent on my NAS

Network-attached storage (NAS) performance is largely governed by the processor, memory, and installed drives. It's possible to give the enclosure a bump to make it better suited to more advanced or heavier workloads. This includes swapping out RAM modules for faster and higher-capacity equivalents, installing faster storage, and using NVMe SSD caching. An NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) is notably quicker than SATA counterparts, be it flash or mechanical. I spent a total of $45 on buying a 500GB SSD for caching, and it was the best decision I made.