A real engineer..
would have been able to determine the limitations by just looking at the Pi4B's architecture and not wasting money/time on building this monstrosity.
The "GigE" ethernet and the USB3 share the same PCIe bus. That's death for any kind of performance for use as a NAS - As Network requests and drive accesses will throttle each other - reducing throughput. As it is, I believe the Pi4B's GigE really is around 300 Mb/s at best due to the PCIe bandwidth.
A single SSD works and is the most cost effective, highest performance approach with the Pi's (3b & 4b). Done. Simple. Next.... I have several of these in this configuration and they work great, for what they are/cost.
I could never understand why anyone would put Pis in a cluster - perhaps to learn about multprocessing, distributing workloads, but that's LEARNING, not expecting performance.
I'm hoping Pi 5's will have dedicated PCIe lanes for network and USB3 and an open-source blob. That would be cool... And fix the audio, put an amp on there so that it can drive a speaker directly (my wishlist)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
