> > > IMHO, Hardware raid primarily exists because of Microsoft Windows and VMware esxi, neither of which have good native storage management. Because of this, it's fairly hard to order a major brand (HP, Dell, etc) server without raid cards. Raid cards do have the performance boost of nonvolatile write back cache. Newer/better cards use supercap flash for this, so battery life is no longer an issue That said, make my Unix boxes zfs or mdraid+xfs on jbod for all the reasons previously given. >