We stream DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (518 GB, 4-bit) from NVMe on a 128 GB M5 Max, because it doesn't fit in RAM.
prompt processing steady decode
upstream, internal 16.23 10.59
ours, internal only 28.04 1.73x 14.38 1.36x
ours, +1 external 36.88 2.27x 16.05 1.52x
ours, +2 external 43.62 2.69x 17.38 1.64x
The first fork row is the one that matters: same single internal SSD, no replicas, no enclosures.
