Lets talk about I/O Operations Per Second (IOPS)
If you assume that you have these disks, their average latency is 4.17ms (which is determined by the platter size & their rotational speed (in this case, 7200RPM)). You also need to know the average read/write seek time to really calculate IOPS. This site claims the average seek time is 12ms (which is horrible, and will be the cause of your problems, as we'll see...)
Determining IOPS is pretty imprecise because to get it right, you need to know what your read percentage is vs your write percentage (writes are slower than reads because, apparently, the head needs to be more precisely placed).
The calculation for IOPS is 1 / (avg latency + avg seek time), so each drive would be capable of 1 / (0.00417s + 0.012s), or 1/.01617, or right around 60 IOPS.
So that's one drive. But you've got several!
You mentioned an 8-disk RAID-10 array. That's great, because while you've got to write the data twice, you can read from all 8 at once.
Assuming a 100% read workload, 60 IOPS X 8 drives = 480 IOPS.
How do IOPS relate to throughput, though? Well, we have to go back to the "imprecise" part, because it depends on what percentage of your disk I/O is random.
On a 100% random workload, you can kind of assume that one operation gives you one block. So then, how big is the block size?
According to this PDF, the DS4100 had a 16k block size.
We can use that to calculate the sheer amount of output you can get.
At around 480 IOPS, each of which is getting 16KB, you'll be pulling 7.68MB/s with a purely random workload. Because your workload isn't random, you're getting ~5.25x this speed.
Look, I seriously doubt that you're ever going to be pulling great numbers with these drives. 12ms seek time is almost criminal, if that's really the case (find out), plus you're probably writing to the array, too, even if you don't know you are.
My advice: learn what your I/O profile looks like. Minimize the amount of writes (mount it noatime if you don't care about POSIX compatibility). Get better disks.
