"A couple of months ago I got a couple of wonderful birthday presents. My lovely geeky girlfriend got me two Western Digital 500 GB SATA 3.0 drives, which were promptly supplemented with a 3ware 9550XS 4-port hardware RAID card. Immediately I came up with the idea for this article. I had just read up on mdadm software RAID so I though it would be perfect to bench mark the hardware RAID against the software RAID using all kinds of file systems, block sizes, chunk sizes, LVM settings, etcetera.
"Or so I though… As it turns out, my (then) limited understanding of RAID and some trouble with my 3ware RAID cards meant that I had to scale back my benchmark quite a bit. I only have two disks so I was going to test RAID 1..."
