Hi @Gabriel_Fair,
That sounds like a fascinating project and we have a great series of blogs on performance improvement including sharding configuration:
Performance Best Practices: Benchmarking | MongoDB Blog
I recommend you go through them.
Having said that, I cannot understand why would someone want to.manage and tune HW without specific knowledge of the software when they can Use MongoDB Atlas and all its tools to scale up or harizontal seamlessly.
If the cluster does not require to be up all the time you cab pause it. We offer students packages and other promotions like Day Zero so you could try the product with topped up credits.
I think this is the solution I would go for using NVME storage for example.
Best
Pavel