RHEL: RAID Performance

I recently purchased 3 new 200GB Maxtor hard drives. I haven't bought a hard drive in a couple of years and the biggest one I owned before this was 80GB, with a second place runner up of 20GB. I'm doing pretty good with the new drives. They are 7200 rpm, IDE, 16MB cache type drives. I just hooked them up in my SMP athlon system and configured a few raid paritions in RAID 0 to test the performance:

root@primary ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/md1

/dev/md1:
Timing cached reads:   956 MB in  2.00 seconds = 477.36 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  264 MB in  3.01 seconds =  87.72 MB/sec
[root@primary ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/md3

/dev/md3:
Timing cached reads:   948 MB in  2.00 seconds = 473.60 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  270 MB in  3.01 seconds =  89.68 MB/sec

It's not often that you can get this kind of performance out of an IDE drive, so I'm pretty happy with my purchases. I did test them with Knoppix in a non-RAID configuration and was able to get 62 MB/sec, so this is nearly 30 MB/sec better!