Sorry, my mistake, I thought you did. Anyway, xdd is also usable under windows (just the script won't help you, you'll have to type the command manually w/ the arguments). xdd is nice in that it avoids all caches of the OS and you can customize workloads.

As for fiber or infiniband, no I use both no help that's just a media layer and FC is at 4Gbit (going to 8Gbit) and infiniband is 10Gbit, but w/ sas you can get 4x3Gbit (12gbit) but that does NOT mean you can actually push that data that's a separate issue. You run into controller and host bottlenecks. The best I've seen so far is 1.2-1.6GiB/s (solaris amd-opteron system w/ 48 drives running zfs) but that's all (zero apps as you're taking all the cpu cycles to do the I/O). As for speed, (thoughput) SSD's are pricey and are still slower than rotational media at this point. For IOPS (which you wouldn't be pushing throughput on) they have an advantage w/ reads but so far a disadvantage w/ writes as far as I can see (which is why I was interested in those xdd runs to get some real #'s).

As for I/O drives they don't look that good if it takes 6 of them to reach 4.2GiB/s for reads & 3.6GiB/s for writes. I would be more curious to know what system that they used that had 6 PCIe 4x slots to use for testing actually. And for the IOPS (which they didn't list for read or write so assuming read here) may be in for a run for the money with multiple cards & ssd's though i haven't priced such a solution.