Which of the following increases storage read throughput?

Scaling refers to adding capacity (vertical or horizontal) to a system generally and does not specifically address read throughput for storage without additional context.

NIC teaming aggregates multiple network interface cards to increase network bandwidth and provide redundancy, which affects network throughput rather than storage read performance.

Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple servers or resources to prevent bottlenecks, but it does not inherently increase the read speed of the underlying storage itself.

Caching places hot data in faster-tier storage (such as RAM or NVMe) so that repeated read requests are fulfilled from the cache rather than the slower spinning disk or remote storage. This dramatically reduces latency and increases the number of read operations per second the system can sustain. It directly and specifically targets read throughput, making it the correct answer.