In an effort to eek more life out of my workstation, I decided to switch from a single mechanical disk to some on-sale Mushkin SSD’s. They were so cheap I decided to get three instead of one, and try software RAID. I’ve had previous experience with software RAID on Ubuntu, and been reasonable pleased with it.
For this upgrade I used three 120gb Mushkin Chronos units. I configured these on a Dell Precision T3500 (which despite its size, is hard to fit three drives into). This precision has a four core Xeon and 24gb RAM. It is old enough to only support sata 2. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 (alternate) and configured the three drives with software RAID 5.
Now the benchmarking: with iostat the previous 500gb WD mechanical drive would provide 70 to 100 IOPS depending on the size and duration of test. The new configuration provides 800 to 1000 IOPS at 4k size with random reads and writes. I do not have enough time to try with only RAID 0 or RAID 1, so treat this data anecdotal.