I wrote:

> You can easily do RAID-5 parity generation two orders of
>magnitude faster than the disk speed.

Thinking about this, it isn't strictly true, but you can certainly approach
it. For example, a test Linux system here does parity generation at ~500
MB/s. 266 MHz AMD K6-2, VIA chipset, ECC SDRAM, so there is nothing snazzy.
A BX chipset has around 800MB/s in memory bandwidth, and the new 820/840
machines have more again.

Jan Mikkelsen.