I&#x27;m not sure that you could say that RAID controllers are a <i>placebo</i> - I&#x27;ve been through multiple hard disk failures that either hardware or software RAID has enabled a graceful recovery from (with no data loss).<p>As for whether or not it&#x27;s superior to ZFS, though, that&#x27;s a tricky question. High-end hardware RAID gets you a lot of neat features that you don&#x27;t find elsewhere, but it&#x27;s expensive and the RAID controller itself tends to become more and more of a point of failure (always keep spares, especially if they go out of manufacture!)