The linux-raid mailing list is predominantly covers linux software RAID, so you may get a lot of software raid centric comments. Like this one. Have you tried setting the Areca to JBOD then using mdadm to set up a software? That might help isolate where the problem is. Just pick any configuration and try it. As a sanity comparison, I'm seeing good seek performance with a 5 disk RAID1 (e.g. 5X redundancy) with resiserfs on Linux software RAID. That's on a production system, so I can't run bonnie++, but I''m definitely seeing significantly better seek performance than you are reporting. -Jeff - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html