No question that native PCIe solutions like NVMe will be faster. But they also suffer from lack of diagnostic tools and the like. SATA has been around now for a long time, and there are a lot of tools for it on most operating systems that understand how to access, format, read diagnostics, upgrade firmware, etc..

Not so much for NVMe. The NVMe drive vendor will have their own basic tools to update firmware and (in theory) test for defects etc. But if WD is any example, they are not always trustworthy.

So the point here being: for a (home) server (especially!), the ability to swap drives around, diagnose and recover from failures, is very high on my personal priority list. So while I adore the lighting quick NVMe drive in my ultrabook, the server here instead gets SATA2 SSDs.

They are still leagues faster than the GigE network connection, which itself is currently still 3X faster than the internet link, so not really a bottleneck for anything here.

Cheers