I have a PC with a 5930 and 64Gb RAM. Pretty decent system overall. Runs CentOS.
I was thinking about adding a internal RAID array using software raid and a R5 4+1 config using Western Digital WD60EFRX drives. These are RAID compliant drives, although as SATA and 7.2k, they don't have the best throughput.
I was wondering if anyone has setup a similar configuration, and what kind of throughput I might be able to expect from a disk group as described.
Naturally, im not going to hold anyone's feed to the fire, just looking for ballpark ideas as to what is reasonable to expect from this config.
Would the difference between a plain JBOD/HBA (SW Raid) vs a HW Raid card make much difference?

Can't answer on the software RAID part of it, since I don't use software RAID for anything other than levels 1 or 10, but with a 4-drive hardware RAID 5 (Adaptec 6405) with 7200 RPM SATA drives I get about 300 MB/s read and write with a 50GB dd dump. Sequential of course, random RW with spinning disks is abysmal regardless of the setup.

That's what I got when it was new, and I just tested again about 3 years after-the-fact and it's the same.