Techniques for operating a serial attached SCSI (SAS) expander that includes a latency table comprising entries of outbound PHYS with latency values associated with connections between inbound PHYs and outbound PHYs. A storage management module to, in response to receipt of a command from an initiator device associated with an inbound PHY to route data to a target device associated with an outbound PHY, select from the latency table a random outbound PHY from among a plurality of outbound PHYs, wherein the random selection is based on weighted average of latency values of the outbound PHY entries of the latency table.