[StillBored]

Its sorta hard to justify those at the moment, since the XHCI interface on the base Pi4B is more than capable of maximizing the PCIe x1 interface. Basically, you can run a NAS at the capabilities of the machine with random USB3 JBODs.

So a $100 5+ bay USB3 JBOD, RPi4B run over the 1G nic, and a 64-bit arm64 distro (because rasbian will die with modern SATA disks in a larger capacity JBOD) and you have a fairly reasonable low end NAS for basically the price of the disks.

(or just plug in 4 of USB3 easystores/etc and save on the enclosure).

[88]

I’ve done this (JBOD with USB 3.0 drives on a Pi 4) and it’s surprisingly effective.

I can easily saturate the 1G NIC which is more than sufficient for my use case.

I don’t use RAID or ZFS so neither the CPU or RAM are limiting factors.