The only fly in the ointment is the lack of SATA or NVMe on the base model. I think there are riser boards out there for that, but it's all very boutique.
While it's true that SATA or NVMe would be ideal, I just recently started booting a Pi 4 straight from a Samsung T7 SSD and it's night and day compared to the SD card even over just USB. I'm sure we'll get to better interfaces one day, but so far I'm very happy regardless.
The USB 2.0 controller seems to be relatively inefficient on the pi 4, or at least the driver is. An RTLSDR dongle uses almost 50% CPU just shovelling samples when it should only use less than 1%.
I wonder how well PXE boot + NFS shares would fare in comparison? Hasn't a lot of the USB stack been pushed into user space in more recent operating systems?
Well, the Ethernet interface is PCI-E, so there's a good chance it would be efficient.
One thing to keep in mind is that USB 3.0 is a completely different independent controller from 2.0. So, just because USB 2.0 sucks doesn't necessarily mean 3.0 does.
It's just unfortunate because you would expect 2.0 to be well optimized by now. I assume the kernel driver must be using the CPU to shovel data from the USB 2.0 controller rather than DMA.
