It isn't the issue but if you really want to test, you can add these to your bitcoin.conf file or use as command line arg:
"onlynet=ipv4" and "onlynet=ipv6" limits your node's outbound connection to those networks, and..
"listenonion=0" disables inbound connections via Tor.

Of course, don't forget to restart Bitcoin Core after changing the settings for it to apply.

You can run into an issue, when your SSD demands too much power from the Raspi 4B. A Raspi 4B can only provide a total power budget of 1.2A@5V (or 6W) for all its USB ports combined! Not exactly sure about the Samsung T7, it will mostly work but maybe can overwhelm the Raspi.

With only 4GB of RAM you will later in IBD run into I/O intense periods when chainstate grows way larger than 4GB and you can't give sufficient RAM to dbcache (see below).

The OS shouldn't be much of a factor here.


From an own full IBD experiment started somewhere in June 2023 with an Umbrel node that only ran a Bitcoin Core container via Tor on a Raspi 4B with 8GB RAM and a 1TB SATA SSD connected with an USB3-to-SATA adapter with UASP properly activated and working, I experienced a full IBD within about 95h until full sync with onlynet=onion, onlynet=i2p basically (I also had a dbcache=4883 in my bitcoin.conf file).

Your IBD will be slower as you can't reserve much more than maybe 2 or 2.5GB to dbcache. During IBD you may consider to set blocksonly=1 to avoid having to verify possibly incoming transactions.

If anyone is interested, I can provide snips from the debug.log that I preserved.

Hey, there. I'm running a Raspibolt node.

Tor is very rarely the problem with slow syncing. It's either failing to find peers, or there is lack of memory. But before that, is your external drive an HDD? If that's so, then expect slow syncing. When I finished syncing a couple of years ago, I think it had taken me around 2 weeks, because of that. So, maybe you should shut down everything, move your blocks and chainstate in an SSD, let it sync there, and then move these directories back to your HDD drive.