charles1

"..it has a nice read/write speed of around 1000 MB/s for 1GB, going down to around 850 MB/s for 5GB."

NICE read/write speeds?!? That speed is terrible. You installed an obsolete, low speed 2230 SSD, one of the slowest, cheapest SSDs on their compatibility list. So your "benchmark" only measures the max speed of the SSD, not the hardware driving it.

For comparison, I have an OWC 1M2 enclosure containing a 4Tb Samsung 990 EVO SSD. The enclosure is rated at 3151Mb/s and the SSD is rated over 7000Mb/s. I consistently get over 3000Mb/s read and write performance.

Your satellite photo is incorrectly attributed to Pexels. It should say: Source: NASA, public domain.

I recall reading that Apple Silicon has some special on-chip extensions that are specifically targeted at running the Rosetta 2 code more efficiently. This is the sort of advanced implementation that you can only create when you own the entire hardware and software stack.
I'm going to have to dig into that, seems like it might be an important competitive advantage.

There is a tech note from SoftRaid warning not to use APFS on HDD RAIDs. In fact, those warnings were upgraded recently during a software update to Carbon Copy Cloner, it now correctly notes that there are problems backing up image files on RAIDs, announcing that it now refused to back up my VM files. I wish I had known my backups were failing months ago when I set them up.

I bought a Thunderbay 8 and put 8x 10Tb drives in it, for a usable RAID5 of ~70Tb. I could not get backups to work on a RAID5 with hard drives, it really needs APFS which requires SSDs. NAS does not work well either, even advanced disk formats like ZFS are unsuitable for MacOS backups.
I figured that to back up my Mac Studio M2U with 4Tb internal SSD, I could just clone the drive with a 1:1 backup since I don't run it close to full. I bought an OWC Express 1M2, and put in a low cost but fast 4Tb SSD. The 1M2 enclosure promises bandwidth up to 3151MB/sec and the SSD promises >6500, I got 3090, very close to the limit! Apparently it runs via USB4 and not Thunderbolt, I don't quite understand the tech but I like it! Right now I'm running backups hourly in Carbon Copy Cloner, the first backup (~3Tb) took about 2.5 hours but hourly incremental backups run in ~15 seconds. I am considering switching over to Time Machine, but 4Tb probably isn't big enough for that.