Tacit's description of RAID 5 is the most easily understood I have seen. cool

But in the case of my system there is no special hardware controller, rather the control is handled in software. Theoretically a hardware controller should be faster than software control and at one time that was easily demonstrable but with faster computers that speed advantage is getting pretty slim. Today the limiting factor is more likely to be the speed of the connecting buss and not hardware vs software controllers. SoftRAID in fact contends their software control can rebuild a damaged volume in a RAID 5 array much faster than competing hardware controllers — I hope I never have to find that out for myself tongue

RAID software has been built into OS X for some time now but it supports only RAID 0 (Striped) and RAID 1 (Mirrored). SoftRAID supports RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 1+0. (Go here for a description of the various RAID levels and their relative performance and features.)

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein