then afterburners kicked in ...

… sumthin fierce … This could be (the) fastest 4U box on the market for streaming, which doesn’t use RAM for storage.

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
   READ: io=761904MB, aggrb=7455.4MB/s, minb=7634.3MB/s, maxb=7634.3MB/s, mint=102196msec, maxt=102196msec

That streaming is more than 8x RAM size. No PCIe flash cards in the unit. None. Zero. Zilch. yeah BABY!!! Right now, running a random read of that data set. 8k random reads across the entire 700+ GB data. Obviously not cached. Running about 330k IOPs. This is still somewhat disappointing relative to the “theoretical max” numbers, but actually its not terrible, and very much along the lines of what I expected.

  read : io=786432MB, bw=2578.2MB/s, iops=330003 , runt=305037msec

I think we can call this one a win …