I was using software RAID 0/5 back in 97-99-ish on extremely busy web servers and never lost any data or suffered any failures. I've used it on and off since then and have never lost any data whatsoever as a result of a software RAID failure. Nowadays, I don't really bother with
it because 3Ware cards are so cheap, but software RAID has been stable under Linux for MANY years. If Drew is having those kinds of problems, he's either having wetware issues or is using dodgy/unsupported hardware.
Cheers, ---
Dodgy unsupported hardware like plain vanilla Intel GTP motherboards and Seagate hard disks? Lol ;-) I'm not entirely certain either how you can have a 'wetware' issue when the installer sets up raid for you, and then it fails for no reason; but you could be right. It doesn't matter now because we're using Dell 1850s and the PERC sata cards work flawlessly for us. I was just giving my impression on the problems we've had in our datacenter with over 1200 servers.
Thanks!
-Drew