I'm not sure that you could say that RAID controllers are a placebo - I've been through multiple hard disk failures that either hardware or software RAID has en

I'm not sure that you could say that RAID controllers are a placebo - I've been through multiple hard disk failures that either hardware or software RAID has enabled a graceful recovery from (with no data loss). As for whether or not it's superior to ZFS, though, that's a tricky question. High-end hardware RAID gets you a lot of neat features that you don't find elsewhere, but it's expensive and the RAID controller itself tends to become more and more of a point of failure (always keep spares, especially if they go out of manufacture!)