what are some bad behaviors you've seen with NFS,ZFS,RAID and how do you diagnose it and how did it lead you to this solution
ZFS -- slow reads due to pool-level decompression. zfs has it's own utilities, iirc it's something like `zpool iostat` to see raw disk vs filesystem IO.
RAID -- with heterogenous disks in something like RAID 6, you get minimum disk speed. This shows up when doing fio benchmarking (the first thing I do after setting up a new filesystem/mounts). It could be that better sw has ameliorated this since (last checked something like 5ish years ago).