I think we agree so I'm not sure what you meant. My point was that you could have made the stated "budget" all-SSD much much cheaper than what he did. A pair

I think we agree so I'm not sure what you meant. My point was that you could have made the stated "budget" all-SSD much much cheaper than what he did. A pair of 980 Pro would easily beat it on bandwidth. How close it would get on IOPS I don't know, but if you stay away for 128 KiB record size you should be in the neighborhood.