I worked in Dell&#x27;s High complexity support for a couple of years. I saws RAID disk failures all day long. I BELIEVE SOFTWARE RAID IS YOUR FRIEND. I&#x27;ve seen hardware RAID system become corrupted because a miner version of the controller software was used after a failure. Except for multiple platter crashes, there has not been a software raid (linux) and Spinright there has never been a RAID I couldn&#x27;t recover.  So... Hardware Raid is NOT worth the extra speed.