>>10895
>But isn't software RAID better than hardware RAID?
From where on earth did you derive that opinion?
Software raid can work anytime the software is in place; less costs but you're at the mercy of the software writer. Hardware needs good firmware, but good hardware will power through mediocre firmware so long as all data-losing bugs are dealt with.

I'm expecting to dual-boot; both Windows and Linux have software raid solutions, but they don't talk to each other. So if you want to dual-boot, and have only software RAID available, you have to choose which OS (and there are others, like BSD, opensolaris, whatever BeOS was replaced by) gets the array.
All other OS installations see a giant "what is that?" block they can't use, and get whatever leftover blocks you can spare to be installed into.
Too, there's always hardware involved. Software raid asks awkward questions of the disk I/O chipset and assembles the answer into what your OS thinks is a complete disk; but integrated chipsets overheat / go bad too.