they are different animals .. 'right tool for the right job' hardware raid has the hw complexity / pickyness you mention, but also is safer in crashes for chec

they are different animals .. 'right tool for the right job' hardware raid has the hw complexity / pickyness you mention, but also is safer in crashes for checksumming raid levels (e.g. 4,5,6) since the stripe checksum happens from controller->disk in hardware rather than os->controller->disk in software, so you're less likely to lose a stripe due to OS issues (all else - like bugs - being equal) also, IO wise, any mirrored raid is going to require N*mirrors of IO on the system bus, so you're more likely to saturate it that said, with faster tech (NVMe), individual drives can easily saturate a single card, so its 'worth' paying the multiple IO pentalty multiplexed onto multiple individual lanes since the card is more likely to be the bottleneck than the bus also, hw raid controllers even in jbod mode might be needed to get enough device fanout, though you're not using the controller for raid in that case