So, if you were building a high-end system today, what would it look like in terms of number and type of drives, controller with cache, I/O bus, etc? Would you stay with the 1231ML and PCIe 1.1, or move to something like the LSI 9260-8i on PCIe 2.0?

Also, given a fixed budget for the project, would you use any X25-E drives (if so, where/for what?), or just stripe more X25-Ms together?