Quote Originally Posted by [XC] itznfb View Post
when i say for all that includes that software cards do indeed have terrible performance compared to hardware. you can find hundreds of people on this forum that will give you examples of software raid cards killing their drives. its kind of hard to diagnose what happened when the drive is dead. but you won't find any of these stories with hardware raid cards.

many business use RAID0 configs on high IO clustered boxes. RAID5/6/1/0 are pretty much being phased out by RAID10 however.
I doubt your claim that you could find "hundreds" of people whose software controllers killed drives.

Facts:
1. Software cards aren't exactly overvolting drives (kind of hard, when they don't supply power)
2. Your controller cannot kill a drive by issuing it malformed commands
3. No commands exist which can themselves kill a drive
4. Controller cards are extremely simple electrical devices. Their ability to fail is quite small (contrast this with hardware cards, which perform the same job but actually produce notably more heat).
5. Hard drives fail regularly. They are in fact the most common source of failure. Saying it's the fault of the software card (but, of course, not a *hardware* card) is just superstition.

You tell me where the fault is in my logic there. If there is an associated higher failure rate (which I'd doubt), I would say it could be because people who can afford hardware cards can generally afford things like higher quality PSU's and drives. Saying it's the fault of an electrical component which doesn't supply power to the device and can only pass along a limited range of predefined commands sounds a lot like superstition to me.

I'm not saying you couldn't find RAID-0 used in businesses, but it's not exactly a best practice. You can get the same (well, n-1) read performance out of a RAID-5 array on a good hardware controller. If they're using RAID-0, they're cutting corners. That said, yes - I have also seen RAID-0 in use... and I have seen it done with software RAID cards as well, because hardware is not warranted. Of course, any time you see a RAID-0 array it should ideally either be used by only a limited number of users who can afford to have it go down or when you have a large number of cheap systems being used in a load-balancing manner which can gracefully deal with the death of one component.