any usb 3.0 drive works, but I am using SanDisk Ultra Fits. price per byte is less and performance is similar or slightly better for reads and way better for sustained writes.

No Overclock.

99-100% CPU on all 4 cores for hours and no throttling. they do run at 75-78C instead of 65C, but I could not get them to throttle.

Even with the cheapo 3 piece heat sinks there was almost no throttling, but they did throttle occasionally after sustained stress.

missed the SD cards. I am benchmarking against the best SD cards I can get because that is always the bottleneck on the Pi to my experience. The bandwidth and clock rate on USB3 vs sdcard bridge is just faster, but the media is also cheaper in USB3 format in general.