Benchmarking Linux filesystems on software RAID 1 (Lone Wolves)

I had a not disimilar experience with 4 channel 3ware hardware years ago and wasn't able to
get any performance out of it at all in a RAID configuration. Perhaps I just didn't read
enough manuals (or make enough paid support calls) to find out what I needed to do to enable
this "writeback cache" (I don't remember what settings we did try, like I said, years ago, at
the time I had detailed notes). I also found the 3ware software to be abysmal and it seemed to
want to wind its tentacles deep into my Linux system which I wasn't very comfortable with.

Like the article's writer, I opted for software RAID, using the 3ware card as a fast ATA to
SCSI controller, and found it to perform very adequately for my needs. Since then I've skipped
hardware RAID controllers altogether in my own machines and wouldn't bother even suggesting
them until they become necessary due to e.g. sheer quantity of drives connected. But we do
have Dell branded SAS RAID on some servers because someone overrode my intended specification,
and it seems to behave itself, at least it's kept out of my way so far. Of course for all I
know it's just that the monitoring doesn't work, and in fact one of the drives died this
weekend and the other will cop out tonight...

I have suffered a series of nasty failures on a PC that I eventually tracked down to a failing
IDE controller. All the contents were under Linux Software RAID, and it soldiered on through a
series of scary-looking IDE errors, I still have both drives which seem to work fine with the
dodgy controller out of the picture (it eventually refused to recognise hard disks on boot, at
which point I realised what was going on and replaced the whole board) and the array was
rebuilt each time with no significant data loss, just an ext3 journal replay needed and a few
hours of reduced disk throughput. That array is now retired because I switched to larger SATA
disks.