Photosynthesis, for example, is a way that plants take energy from the abiotic environment and incorporate it into the biotic environment by synthesizing sugars and proteins from it. Other components of the biotic environment, such as herbivores, eat the plants and transfer the nutrients further along the chain.
Source: Adaptec. Backplanes are the fundamental building block to any storage appliance that is meant to support hot plugging. So, SAS expanders will always go hand in hand with powerful backplanes (whether these are in a single box or not).
Clearly forwarding rate depends on frame size. Ideally a backplane switching fabric should be non blocking for every frame size including the smallest ones (64 bytes in ethernet standard) but in reality most devices can be non blocking for an average size of 400 bytes. bandwidth: the speed of traffic.