Even if you don't have specialized storage. You need to mount something for it to be a storage medium. Using only scp is like manually doing all IOPs. Though you can use scp (or even FTP) as a ledger in fuse to mount network target, but that would be an insane thing to do, as it adds all kinds of overhead. The most popular NAS protocol is still
SMB via cifs, scp is something different entirely.