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). -- John Lange President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location