fe31nz:125MB/s sounds reasonable. 269MB/s would be burst rate when reading from cache. It's not an accurate measure of HDD performance.
That used to be the case, but these days there are plenty of spinning rust drives that are faster than gigabit Ethernet. 1 Gbit/s = 125 Mbytes/s - actual speed will be less due to the protocol overheads. Take a look at this for an example of a fast modern enterprise class drive:
https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDSE90160/Seagate-35-16TB-Enterprise-Capacity-Exos-SATA-6Gbs
Note the maximum sustained transfer rate of 269 Mbytes/s. I have a slightly older ST14000NM0018 model and two ST12000NM0007's and yes, they really are that fast. And in a speed oriented RAID setup with multiple drives, even older drives will work faster than 1 Gbit/s. I would love to have a 10 Gbit/s network - it is a pain moving huge video files between these drives over just 1 Gbit/s.
I take your point re: Mbps & MB/s. I forgot about that ;)
Jase2985:Can you point me to a mechanical HDD which has a sustained read speed of 300MB/s?
yeah na, a standard sata 6gb drive will sit at 200-300MB/s sustained writes, which is faster than the 125MB/s that Gigabit Ethernet allows