Have you seen this article on ATAoE which falls under
the “fun with RAID” category:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149

The Coraid systems look promising. Wish we had budget
for that here at work…

(response by me)

Nice! Hadn’t seen that before. I haven’t thought much about hardware until recently… in my new job I’ve spent a lot of time learning about it (so the link is much appreciated!).

I’m curious what the author used to test read/write times. Bonnie++ probably wouldn’t be a good measuring tool unless buffer sizes were tweaked.

It’s cool that he used JFS since it’s easy to grow partitions without unmounting (like XFS, ReiserFS). I’ve used XFS a bit at home but it’s tough for me to really tell any huge differences between the performance of ext3 partitions. I have to do a hdparm test or two to really know what’s faster.