That's the link speed from the HBA to the expander, 8x600MB/s with dual link, and the max theoretical speed possible, you can get better than that with a SAS3 HBA+Expander, I got around 5500MB/s total with the 9300-8i and Intel RES3TV360, because they are SATA devices they will never reach quite max PCIe 3.0 device, for that you'd need SAS3 devices, still good speed for 24 devices, and note that in this case, unlike with a SAS2 HBA + expander, speed might vary with the devices used, can only speak for the devices I used to test, unless you buy SAS3 disks.