Hardware RAID is pretty much a niche at this stage. And unreliable and unsafe in general. Using it is like having an open fire pit inside your home because it's

Hardware RAID is pretty much a niche at this stage. And unreliable and unsafe in general. Using it is like having an open fire pit inside your home because it's nice and cozy, and assuming that your house not having burned down yet means it's a good idea. So far the only deployments where I've still seen it somewhat relevant is single-node Windows machines without virtualisation (so the balance between trusting windows with your block storage vs. trusting a RAID controller swings towards the controller), and large proprietary SANs where you don't really have a choice. Everything else is either local software RAID (or ZFS), or a cluster filesystem with block storage support for SAN consumption. And then there is the worst of all worlds: firmware-enabled software RAID like the ones you get with consumer mainboards. As far as I know, that only exists because of windows and the legacy inability to boot from anything except a single-disk magic method on MBR or single ESP partition based booting in UEFI. It's all just crutches for bad systems to not have to do it correctly.