Software RAID 5 or something else?

[aragonx at dcsnow.com]

I would like to thank everyone for their advice.  After considering my
situation, I decided to try the software RAID 5 and see what happened.  I
put my system drive (500GB Western Digital) plus 4 of the RAID drives
(750GB Samsung) on the motherboard.  One RAID drive is on a PCI-E SATA
controller card.

Before the RAID 5 I had my data on two of the 750GB drives.  I did a
sequential transfer test using Samba and got the following averages (3
runs per direction):

45.54MB/sec from the server
46.16MB/sec to the server

After the RAID 5 I got the following:

52.66MB/sec from the server
47.46MB/sec to the server

I have two more client PCs which showed significantly slower results. 
This leads me to believe that my limitations are probably more on my
client systems than on the server.

If anyone is interested, I can post the specs of all my systems and the
other results for comparison.

---
Will Y.



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