I see. And if the Ethernet competes with USB for bandwidth this is probably doubly not great, even if I’m just serving files straight up over samba. Indeed, this same Pi was used as a front end (kodi) to my current server before I got a smart tv and it worked great for that. I have a smart tv now so this pi needs new use, and I want a server more compact.

I know now that my question diverges from the Pi community, but do you have any good sites that have different NAS builds using boards similar to what you posted, or communities of this kind? I think I’d like to geek out a bit creating different builds. As mentioned, it’s been some time since my last build