Civil 3D | High-Performance Server

I'm working with Dell on a new 'performance' server.

I was extremely disappointed to learn that there's no real option for using all NVMe storage at +/- RAID 10 equivalent speeds, that SAS SSD + hardware RAID 10 still offered better performance, than all NVMe U.2 + Windows Server Storage Pool/Spaces (not to be confused with Storage Spaces Direct).

That said, we put together some quotes for SAS SSDs in RAID 10 that allows plenty of room to expand storage capacity and by definition expand performance of the disk array as more and more pairs of disks are added... Dell kindly 'offered' a 58% discount after a few days of 'negotiating' (translation: me vs 3 different reps, 1 engineer, 1 regional manager & the finance manager... Advantage, me Haha).

Before we pull the trigger on this, can anyone confirm/deny the performance hit when using Storage Pool/Spaces on all NVMe U.2 drives?

I know that there's no hardware RAID capability with NVMe U.2 at this point (which stinks); I thought Storage Pool/Spaces would have been the logical choice, so it was news to me when speaking with a Dell Engineer (not the rep) on the storage configuration that we'd actually get better performance and it would cost less to instead use SAS SSD in RAID 10.

Regardless, even with SAS SSD in RAID 10, we're still looking at a significant increase in read/write speed on the server, as compared to the SAS HDD in RAID 5 we have now (we're an SMB)... I still just feel like I'm missing something on the all NVMe U.2 option & hoping someone can help to clarify.

TIA; Cheers