I ran a bunch of workstations with Windows 7 for many years this way, also using the predecessor of PrimoCache with local SSDs with a cache. I had an OpenSolaris server for the backing storage with ZFS/COMSTAR.
I've been pretty much Linux only for the last ~15 years or so, but NVMe/TCP is so much faster. I would look at doing a secondary disk applications using NVMe/TCP once booted.
I've been using Deye since 2019. I was using those blue grid-tie inverters with limiters to do zero-export and they had the Deye manufacturers sticker on it. So I googled them, found them on Alibaba, and purchased some directly from them. I had no idea that they were related to Sol-Ark until later. Fortunately, I never trusted their dongle/cloud solution and so only ever plugged it in when I requested firmware updates from them.
I learned at some point that they were designed with Sol-Ark, and that Sol-Ark put pressure on them to stop selling to the U.S. market, and indeed they stopped selling to anyone directly in the U.S. I get Sol-Ark's position, but there are numerous people that bought them not even knowing the relation nor that they would be considered grey-market (since buying products direct from China is really common). Also, like pretty much everybody I know that screws around with this stuff, none of use would have paid for the Sol-Ark nor were we really aware of them because they so expensive anyways.
Even if this decision came purely from Deye, it's a direct result of Sol-Ark putting pressure on them to stop the sell of inverters into the U.S. market, and enough middle-men were getting around that, that they felt the need to do this.
Again, I get Sol-Ark's position, but it's just a really bad look for them. I think it's similar to certain media piracy: The people wouldn't have paid for it how you are offering it anyways, and all you're doing is making potential future customers hate you; It would certainly be more profitable to focus those resources on something else.
I’ve been using community edition JuiceFS with Percona XtraDB cluster for Metadata and MinIO multi-node for a couple of years for large archival and backup data storage. That setup has worked really well.