look, tilt,
people are discussing here the hardware, i think mostly people are looking for numbers and not where these numbers are coming from..
optimizing your hardware for a benchmark or a test suit, doesn't make much difference, it's not about competition, but on finding out the causes for one device to operate differently then another.

most people are hard with it, as it isn't easy understanding the processes from the inside, on the superficial level, what you see is the out come, and when one is unfemiliar with the hardware, this is what he/she are generally looking at and for.
this gives him/her confidence, that his/her hardware is working well, at the beginning you look for speed, then you are looking for access time and IOP's, then after you are done with these outputs, you start looking where they are coming from...

you see, one device from different manufacturers, can give different result, and to test that, you need equipment from various manufacturers, and you need people that can take these results, and look inward into them, they have to have interest in it, they have to want to figure out what is happening inside, yet people mostly are fan-boying this product or the other.

you have a 12 acard system that showed 93K for the HDD suit at PCMV and 63 with 6 drives on a quad processor, now part of this test is also CPU included,
yet why is it, that these arrays, lose part of they're efficiency throughout the benches?

now this can happen due to the bench is not equally using the full array, this can be CPU bound which is coming from not decent enough programing, yet if what people are looking for is results, they might overlook such matters,
and then you find out that all the benches you have done, don't worth much.
there is also the matter that companies hide information from the users, as there is a lot of competition all around, and so it is hard to get accurate results when you are not getting every piece of information.

last thing, i don't think people dig enough, you can go over a benchmark, and it is showing one result and then at a later page it is showing another,
when you try to figure the difference you see that one benchmark was done with write back on and the other without, then one was with compression and the other without, one with overclock and the other without, one with more cache and the other without,
so you cannot work like that,
this is becoming even more confusing when you have to open multiple threads to compare a single result, search google for hints and find something which later comes out false, and people are running along.

i think, maybe the only way to be able to really do something, is having either a mutual effort, a lot of benching, and a lot of hardware you have by your own,
this is all very confusing, and i'm not sure it is going anywhere..