[hate]

Software raid is any onboard raid that isn't driven by its own CPU. ie, onboard "raid" cards are software raid rebadged so the idiots can figure out how to set it up. Raid 1 is mirroring, raid 0 is striping, raid 2,3, and 4 aren't used, raid 3 is some kind of odd parity where a single disk is the parity disk rather than raid 5 where parity is spread across the disks. Raid 0 isn't technically a raid type anyway.

This has everything to do with I/O. And as for AncientPC, he quotes that this has at most to do with server applications, yet WinTV/Tivo is going to be the perfect application of a good software raid with that gigantic amount of disk usage. If you can manage to set one up for yourself, it's worth it. As for the 10-15% performance increase, that's pretty much bunk. Moving from 2 disks on separate channels using mirroring (raid 1), my sustained read rates jumped from 35MB/s from a single disk to about 58MB/s from the 2 mirrored disks. Striping will sustain read and write rate improvements that will be akin to that, if not better. The more disks you add, the less your performance increase will be, and putting ATA disks on the same channel decreases your advance in speed considerably.