Now, in my mind, the performance difference between the two (software vs hardware) can come down to how much you’re willing to spend on your hardware RAID controller.  A quick example:

Lets say you put a cheap hardware RAID controller in your quad-core machine, which normally has a minimal load.  I would think the quad-core machine would have more than enough processing power to handle the RAID, as compared to the cheap hardware controller.

On the flip-side, if you get a quality card that has RAID specific instruction sets it could likely perform even better than a quad-core machine.

Is this an accurate assumption?  I should mention that I have only really used software RAID so I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience on the other end.  What I’m looking for is your experience..

I’d really like to hear the communities thoughts and experiences on hardware RAID vs software RAID.  Which do you use and why? (The why is what I’m looking for).