Thanks. What would be "high-throughput" like transferring large files or something.
Yep.
It's all just scale, Kbps, Mbps and MB/s.
8000Kbps = 8Mbps = 1MB/s
The best quality .mp3 files are 320Kbps.
A Digital SD Stream (DVD Quality) is less than 2Mbps
A Digital HD Stream is usually somewhere between 4-8Mbps (a raw DVD rip is about the same)
A Blu-Ray can be almost 45Mbps but most are lower.
Even and old HDD can do 70-80 M
B/s. New 1TB platter HDDs can do 120-160MB/s.
So no matter how you configure your storage, you will have plenty of speed in your HDDs to serve multiple media streams simultaneously.
Some people use RAID to speed up transfer rates because you can stripe the data across several HDDs that can be read at the same time. If you had a RAID setup with 3 HDDs then you could "stripe" 1/3 of a 1GB file on each of the drives and then when you wanted to load the file it would read 3x faster (in theory) because all 3 drives could be serving the info at the same time. Hardware RAID and ZFS RAID systems work this way (depending on the RAID level you choose).
Your network will probably be a bottleneck before your storage system.
A basic home network will be 100Mbps
A lot of newer wired networks are Gigabit (1000Mbps)
If anything is wireless then you will probably be in the 20-80Mbps range for those devices (depending on your router, the wireless adapter in the device you're using and signal strength).
Hope this helps clear it up.