I recently built a server with a hardware 3Ware 9500 RAID card. This is the SATA version and it has 4 180G drives attached to it.
Once the machine was built I wanted to bench the RAID array just to make sure everything was working and I thought I'd share the results here just for interest.
For comparison I have results from a 4 drive SATA SOFTWARE RAID set and my workstation.
Using bonnie++ v1.3a for benching.
Hardware RAID ------------- Machine is a P4 3.2Ghz.with 2G of ram. (4 Disk SATA Hardware RAID 5)
Sequential Blocks Out: 53,282 K/sec Sequential Blocks In: 146,837 K/sec
Software RAID ------------- Machine is a P4 2.8Ghz.with 1G of ram. (4 Disk SATA Software RAID 5)
Sequential Blocks Out: 64,924 K/sec Sequential Blocks In: 80,435 K/sec
Workstation (NON RAID ATA Drive) -------------------------------- Machine is a Athalon 1.8Ghz.with 512K of ram.
Sequential Blocks Out: 22,081 K/sec Sequential Blocks In: 27,434 K/sec
Noteworthy: During block reads and writes, neither the software or hardware raid caused any significant CPU load (less than 10% in all cases).