Hardware vs software raid

[Mat Cantin]

> Depending on your needs, these cards (or a lot of them
> at least, since it is easy to saturate the PCI bus) may not give you
> the highest performance, but for most applications I find that it is
> more than sufficient (I have it setup on Zoneminder camera servers,
> Samba servers, NFS file servers, among other things).  It just might
> not be best for say putting a database on.

I've looked at trying to find a reliable means to monitor whether the  
PCI bus is being saturated, only to come up with what seemed like a  
hardware gimmick. Is there a way to determine if the PCI bus is being  
saturated within the OS? I suppose one could calculate the theoretical  
PCI bus throughput in Mb/s, but this doesn't seem very concrete to me  
since the quality of hardware often determines if the top thresholds  
can be met.

--
matoc