While that's the ARC, I would be surprised if they blocked you from building vdevs with SSDs.
replyLooking at the specs: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...
Hard Drive Capacity
(16) 2.5/3.5" HDD / SSD support
(2) M.2 NVMe SSD support
(2) Expansion ports support
I think you're right we only get two SSDs on NVME as the cache, but it looks like we can run the rest (16) as SATA SSDs, which is often fine if you primarily care about random IOPS and capacity over pure throughput.
Would you consider that a dealbreaker?
No I think it's perfectly fine, if I'm accessing files over a network I don't expect them to be blazing fast anyway.
replyFYI: you should upgrade to 10gbe if your network is slow. It isn't that expensive these days: https://ben3d.ca/blog/home-network-lessons
replyNot sure if you've looked into this but you can ditch Bell's router with one of these:
replyhttps://store.10gtek.com/1-25g-media-converter-sfp-slot-with...
Or a non-copper equivalent in your case. You just need to use the VLAN IDs that Bell expects, see https://www.reddit.com/r/bell/s/uUltTdyqFC