[vantage255]

with 8 or more drives, they are close. The big speed issue that most people here will see isnt a processor based issue though. Most people dealing with hosting on a non enterprise level will have issues due to their raid arrays being only 3 or 4 drives. As this forces 2 writes onto one drive for every write to the array. This hurts write performance badly.

With enough drives raid5 is certainly a good choice. And a lot of buffer help. some EMC sans I work with have 32 or 64 GB of buffering. that makes a huge performance boost.