Quote Originally Posted by NapalmV5 View Post
look you think you know better than me?.. no problem.. but dont be surprised when and why my 1231/4x x25e decimates your 8x mlc/pcie2 sas
I wasn't trying to assert that the 9260 with 8x MLC would be faster than the 1231 with 4x SLC. I've seen the benchmarks in the other thread. In my environment, small block random I/O rates determine performance much more than sequential I/O. The lower latency on the 1231 makes complete sense.

The original question I was trying to ask is something completely different: how would you build the fastest possible system? First choose the fastest drives and controller. If the 1231 is the best, and if more drives or a PCIe 2.0-based controller won't help, then what's next? Stripe a bunch of them together? Are there configuration tweaks, such as NTFS cluster size, strip/stripe size, disabling cache, or what?

Or maybe switching to a native PCIe-only controller would be better? That should eliminate the SATA latency, which would help a lot with small block random I/O.