On Feb 7, 2012, at 3:53 PM, Ken Smith <kens at kensnet.org> wrote: > Hi, I've seen comments about the poor performance of these cards with > raid 5 configs. I have an old card with 3 x 500G IDE drives connected in > raid 5 and I'm getting around 10mb/s write performance. :-( > > I'm seeing high iowait figures at times and associated very high cpu > load average figures, probably because, under load, everything is > stacked up waiting for the disks to actually do something. > > A non-raid sata disk in the same machine manages 70mb/s > > Does anyone know what the performance is like if I used the 3ware just > as an IDE controller? I could then switch to software raid5? I'm sure you can, but if that's what you want why not just get a better SATA card or a better RAID card? -Ross