imo, hardware raid is irrelevant for most small-scale use-cases and can be a liability for homelabbers. In a professional context, I’ve had a raid card shit itself causing temporary data loss and downtime because my idiot bosses didn’t buy a spare card back when they set up their system. If you’re doing hardware RAID, you must buy two cards, and they MUST be on the same firmware version. Software RAID is basically just as fast, is far more flexible, has one less SPOF, and is cheaper (a cheap HBA being all you need hardware-wise). About the only other thing some RAID cards have is a battery backup unit to get around write hole issues, but good filesystems can help with that too.
Hardware RAID isn’t necessarily obsolete, but I’d say it’s like mainframes—the applications for it are highly specialized.
imo, hardware raid is irrelevant for most small-scale use-cases and can be a liability for homelabbers. In a professional context, I’ve had a raid card shit itself causing temporary data loss and downtime because my idiot bosses didn’t buy a spare card back when they set up their system. If you’re doing hardware RAID, you must buy two cards, and they MUST be on the same firmware version. Software RAID is basically just as fast, is far more flexible, has one less SPOF, and is cheaper (a cheap HBA being all you need hardware-wise). About the only other thing some RAID cards have is a battery backup unit to get around write hole issues, but good filesystems can help with that too.
Hardware RAID isn’t necessarily obsolete, but I’d say it’s like mainframes—the applications for it are highly specialized.