Now I hear all the time the talk of hardware vs software raid, but to be honest, nothing of value comes from the discussions I've seen on them.

The biggest problem I have is that people immediately declare onboard raid as "software" and "hardware" raid is only on dedicated. This is not too helpful when looking for a better raid controller as, according to everyone I've seen talk about it, onboard is the absolute worst and anything on an add-in board is better.

The next problem ties in with that. How can I tell that an add-in board is better than another add-in board or better than onboard? I don't really see any website comparing benchmarks of raid hardware, at least not up until enterprise level hardware.

What I currently have is a Raid 5 setup (3x 400GB drives) on an Intel ICH8 controller. The system is rather low end as it's almost purely a file server (Celeron E1500, 2GB of ram).

The peak write seems to be about 75-80MB/s, but it quickly drops to around 40MB/s, which seems far too low for what it should be.