[CentOS] 4.4/64-bit Supermicro/ Nvidia RAID [thanks]

>
> Hardware raid is not necessarily faster than software raid.


hardware raid with battery-backed writeback cache is HUGELY faster at 
the very critical synchronous commit (fsync()) operations required by 
transactional database servers.     so it all depends on what your 
application requirements are.    if you just care about single threaded 
sequential reads, you'll probably do best with software SATA RAID10 on 
SATA.  if you need fast random access committed writes, then you need a 
raid card with cache, and a battery so that you can safely enable 
writeback caching in the controller.