I found my R8000 to be very reliable for eight-plus years. Although I’ve replaced it with an OPNsense router so I can have VLAN and multiple WAN support, I still roll it out once a year to support my Twinkly holiday lights. Sorry yours had an issue.

The T7 series gets very hot under sustained writes, hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, and as you’ve found, sometimes hot enough to shut itself down. I have also seen that problem with intermittent writes if the drive is buried under papers, so I make sure that it is on the desk with available airflow near it.

If I’m going to be doing a bulk write to fill up one of my non-Shield T7s, I literally place a metal bowl with ice directly on top of it for the duration of the transfer. But I’ve found that extreme step is only necessary when I’m writing continuously. YMMV.

“planning to run an ethernet cable” ==> “planning to run several ethernet cables”

The labor is the real cost here. Never pull one if you can pull more than one at the same time.

I don’t work for or at Intel.

But I would be surprised if their future direction was “simply more of the same.”

At some point, I would expect further differentiation between cores, e.g. not just E and P cores, but more letters of the alphabet, with different specializations per core type.

Maybe Arc moves into the main processor as A and/or G cores. Maybe an L and/or I core variant derived from E for even lower power when idle. Maybe yet more cores dialed in for bursty network traffic or sustained numerical workloads or equal-path crypto engines or who knows what.