>> 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. > > > Well, I had them ship me a 3ware 9550 card, and yes, am using ext3, > -there's no onboard battery backup module, so the write cache is > disabled. So this would be slow then? Am using this as a Java > Development machine. Disabling write cache will slow you down big time if you have a lot of I/O. If you don't, it probably does not matter. > > Any suggestions as to the filesystem type that would work best? I'll > order a battery backup unit so we can proceed and enable write cache. Since you are running 64-bit Centos, I guess using the plus kernel and the XFS filesystem should do you good. XFS has the best write performance and it sings on the 3ware.