On Sad, 2004-08-14 at 01:31, J. Ryan Earl wrote:

On the brightside, md raid5 is often faster than hardware raid5.  At 
least on the 7000 and 8000 series of 3ware hardware; the 9000 series 
looks promising though.  I haven't seen megaraid SATA numbers, and I 
don't know what happened to the SX8.

Be cautious what you measure. One of he problems until you reach PCI-X
is PCI bandwidth. Thus software md5 can look good but the moment its
combined with other PCI activity goes down the pan entirely.

When the libata Marvell drivers come out, you'll have a cheap upgrade 
path for PCI-X boards if you want fast md raid: 

Agreed. PCI-X will change a lot of this for boxes that are not very
cpu/memory limited.