I'm considering a small unraid using only SSDs -- I need a modest NAS and SSDs avoid the spinup issue of using mechanical disks plus speed would only be limited by my network.

 

My question is if the unraid array also had a Windows 10 VM would that Windows 10 VM be able to access the array faster than over the network? Would the performance be similar to just a normal machine with an SSD?

 

I think the answer is yes but virtualization is not something I have any experience with.

 

 

As far as I understand it, you want to know if a vm on the local hardware can access the data faster than over a gigabit network. With the virtio drivers installed, it doesn't use the network at all the access your data so you'll get "good" read write performance, but it still won't be bare metal. I don't have an ssd array, but my ssd cache drive gets read writes of around 350MB/s. If you needed good write performance, an ssd cache drive would remove the tax of the array. I'm not sure how read performance would be directly off an array, but I suspect it would be sufficient.