Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a home server that runs on a ZFS pool on a hard drive array. That setup works great when prioritising capacity and reliability, things that I’m obviously looking for in a NAS. I have no trouble streaming large files, and the system has been exceptionally stable for me. But over time, I started observing a few instances where the entire system felt slower than it should. It wasn’t something that showed up in benchmarks, but opening directories with thousands of files, like images, certainly took much longer than expected. Apps that scanned large media folders would pause more often than I thought they should. Elsewhere, container workloads that relied on lots of reads also felt less responsive than they should. The hard drives weren’t saturated, the problem was latency.