> I'm using 4 Seagate SX118273LC (18G) drives in a software RAID-1, mostly > because I wanted to see what putting together a RAID was like (and at > the time I bought them, the drives were relatively cheap). Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad. RAID1 is good for fault tolerance, and for read performance... but worse than a single drive's performance for randomised writes. Software RAID implementations would give you worse performance on writes under all conditions, I wager. Try a non-RAID volume in your tests. Keep in mind that one write is triggering TWO writes in TWO transactions over the same SCSI card (and bus, probably). This isn't going to be good for latency or bus utilisation. Before you rip out too much hardware (and hair), try it with a "simple" volume first. =MB= -- A focus on Quality.
