Ultimately disks don't really care whether it's software or hardware that sends them the commands. Even hardware RAID is somewhat of a misnomer. Just like the

Ultimately disks don't really care whether it's software or hardware that sends them the commands. Even hardware RAID is somewhat of a misnomer. Just like the disks themselves, it's just an embedded CPU, varying degrees of hardware acceleration, possibly battery/ultracap backup and a big software stack. Software RAID can achieve high capacity and/or performance. No difference in principle to hardware RAID there. You can use multiplexing for huge SAS backplanes in either case.