Ok, I did some more detailed tests with IOMeter with specific reads/writes/sizes/randomness on both my RAID 5 array and a simple File IO volume.

Here is what I got for numbers for the RAID 5 array (256K stripe size):
Sequential access:
Transfer Size, Write Speed, Read Speed
512b, 6, 20
4k, 44, 80
16k, 108, 112
32k, 113, 112
128k, 115, 115
256k, 112, 112

Random access:
Transfer Size, Write Speed, Read Speed
512b, 1.4, 20
4k, 10.8, 80
16k, 36.5, 111
32k, 55.8, 112
128k, 64, 115
256k, 51, 111

Previously I was doing the "all in one test" and testing windows file copy speeds, so I didn't see that in some cases I am getting acceptable speeds. But now I want to know how can I get these speeds to translate into fast file copy speeds in my Windows 2003 guest OS. Is this now a VMWare tweaking issue? Does it have anything to do with my stripe size? Or the VMFS partition properties (block size, etc)?

Thanks for any suggestions

Hugh