You guys are forgetting something - it's all fine and dandy to have
hardware raid - and in some cases it may be faster - but is it $650
faster?

If you are dealing with "big ass systems", then go with the hardware
stuff. If you are Joe Schmoe at home, or even at a small shop, I seriously
doubt you are going to be running out to buy a $650 raid card. I know *I*
won't be doing that soon! :)

A good analogy to use in all this is back when things like Stacker were
popular. Drives were damn expensive for anything over 200 meg. Stacker
comes along and for $50 you can double the size of your hard drive. Was it
the best method? Of course not. Did it work? Yep. And it worked well for
what it was. Sure it slowed things down, but who cares? 

The same is true in this entire discussion. Sure, a $650 RAID card might
speed things along, but name me one of us that can justify putting a $650
card in our desktop machine we play games on and surf the net and maybe
write some code. In thoses cases software RAID more than fits the
bill. Heck, I don't even think it would be worth buying a $25 RAID card to
be honest (I have no more slots for one, and no more room to mount drives
for another). 
-- 

Randy Rathbun                            randy@randyrathbun.org
http://astrodot.org - 100% Amateur Astronomy. No preservatives.
http://randyrathbun.org          http://quitequitefantastic.org
I refuse to participate in HackSDMI.
 See http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector/current.html

"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. "
 ~ Groucho Marx