I might have missed it, but why is it clear that lemmy is reaching a plateau of users?

Oh also, drives have become a lot better at handling heat or at least are more reliable imo. If you can, try to stick to drives rated to go in a nas. I used to have drives failing all the time, but not so much over the last few years.

What kind of speeds do you get, and how much storage approx?

I’ve gone the route of raiding usb drives before, but 5/10/40gb ports didn’t exist so it was always slow and not worth it.

Sounds like you basically have a DAS that connects over usb, that’s pretty cool if it works well.