Please do not top post. This has been fixed for you.
I must say that the 3ware cards on those boxes that had them were not 955x series and therefore had no cache. Perhaps things would have been different if it were 955x cards in there but at that time, the 9xxx 3ware cards were not even out yet.
Since you have clearly pointed out the performance benefit really comes from the cache (if you have enough) on the board I do not see why using software raid and a battery-backed RAM card like the umem or even the gigabyte i-ram for the journal of the filesystem will be any less slow if at all.
William Warren wrote:
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/09/fake-raid-fraid-sucks-even-more-at.html
Are you trying to say that the drivers provided by Promise, Highpoint and other cruft are on the same level as Linux's software raid code and therefore Linux's software raid driver sucks?