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I figure a hardware solution will be more able to recover from a drive failure.


Just remember that "hardware solutions" are really just more software in a different, less-accessible, less-hackable, place. When drives go bad with a "hardware solution", it's more likely to "cope" without intervention, but there's more chance of losing everything too.

I have several *very* high-end "hardware" RAID boxes here, and all of them use Linux software RAID internally.

Cheers