[crabbone]

You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure.

What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author believes that while the way the system is configured might be OK today, it won't be OK in the future.

[Ekaros]

Memory chips failing to me sounds like extremely bizarre fear. Memory has been extremely reliable for long time now. It is much more likely any other component on same mainboard failing than memory.

[crabbone]

It still makes it a single point of failure...

[Ekaros]

Every single component in NAS which breaking stops operation is single point of failure. So should those all too be socket mounted?