Depending on your use case I would argue. If you use it as a pure nas it wouldn't matter. If you want to do fast encoding or something similar and get bottlenecked by your storage it could be annoying. I do post processing on my NAS and use my SSD as swap so I like every mb/sec I can get :)
Edit: arg thought the comment was responding to a different comment from me. (Where I talked about my home ceph setup that was another reason why I need fast swap)
Yes I build something using a standard x86_64 (celeron) setup. I heavily experimented with an all arm setup thought. I still find it pretty hard to balance a cheap build that is expandable. I recently lost an OSD and my setup had a consistently high load while recovering.
I don't really like the power consumption of my current setup and am thinking of moving to arm. (I use multiple small HDDs between 1tb and 10tb and have different pools with different redundancys. Am thinking of replacing it with a simple raid or something and 3-4 12tb HDDs with a simple redundancy. Could use minio as s3 replacement and btrfs as fs [I won't use zfs for different reasons] btrfs has snapshots, compression and deduplication so everything I want and need. Never did use rbd over network)
Edit: This is my home setup I'm talking about. At work we got a real setup.
Just buy a FreeNAS mini from IXSystems. It just works. I have had one for 6 years now with no issue. Yes it cost money, but if you can pay for 4x12TB then I assume you can pay for the mini. :)
When I was younger and still an everyday networking guy I had a rack with tons of kit, ran my own DNS, firewall was OpenBSD, etc. Today I have a family and a sr. role at a startup. My network is 100% Ubiquiti, storage is a FreeNAS Mini and every TV has an AppleTV with the same apps and setup. Why because I do not have time to play anymore. Why because if I get killed in a car accident my non-techy wife can understand the tools I left.
My Celeron boxes spend most of their life at ~6W, burst to 15W. Drives are all attached via USB, but since these are Intel Broadwell based Celerons (5 years old now! wow, long in the tooth. time flies), there are 4x USB3.0 root complexes that can run pretty much full tilt.
Trying to go lower power doesn't feel worth it, particularly when the hard drives drink so much power.
I feel like I'm spilling the beans sharing this, but ServeTheHome has has an excellent "TinyMiniMicro" series on ~1L size mini-PCs, which are used in businesses a lot. They are much beefier boxes than my little celeron, now often 6 core with way higher clocks. They come with 35W and 65W cpus, but even the couple generations old models still tend to idle at ~10W & otherwise sip power only as demanded[1].
If power is your concern, get rid of your small hard drives. Switch to ARM? Meh.
FAst encoding and NAS are not synonyms. You need a compute system for that, so you're already in the realm of storage server. NAS is not a "storage server", it's function is primitive.
The network interface is a single gigabit port so this does not matter one bit.