RAID controllers tend to use i960 or StrongARM CPUs that run at speeds that _aren't_ all that impressive. With software RAID, you can take advantage of the _enormous_ increases in the speed of the main CPU.
I don't know so much about FreeBSD's handling of this, but on Linux,
there's pretty strong indication that _SOFTWARE_ RAID is faster than
hardware RAID.
Unless something has changed though, you can't run raid 10 with linux software raid and raid 5 sucks for heavy writes.
J
It has the further merit that you're not dependent on some disk formatting scheme that is only compatible with the model of RAID controller that you've got, where if the controller breaks down, you likely have to rebuild the whole array from scratch and your data is toast.
The assumptions change if you're looking at really high end disk
arrays, but that's certainly another story.
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