disappointing, but it's true. Supermicro verified what all of you said. And since I'm not very interested in software RAID, i'll be dropping a hardware RAID card in and let my vendor know not to try and sell any more of these to those intending to use a Linux OS.
I'll try out your software RAID steps to give me something to play with till the hardware card shows up, since they are very clear and concise. Maybe it'll soften the empty 'no hardware raid5' feeling one has at present.
Hardware raid is not necessarily faster than software raid. If you are going to do raid5...make sure your card has plenty of cache. However, that may be moot anyway unless you use some filesystem other than ext3...is it a 3ware card? 3ware + RAID5 + ext3 = slow.