What Is The Diffrence Detween Hard/Soft Raid

[z123killer]

What is the difference between a hardware raid and a software raid?

[Philcat101]

Hardware has specialized chips and embedded code, and software runs on OS software, so it doesn't have direct processing power allocated and has to wait to have said processing power.

Hardware raid is ideal

[Electronics Wizardy]

Hardware raid is done on a dedicated chip and is invisible to the OS. The os see's it as one drive. 

Pros

-Low cpu usage

-Battery back up for low/no data loss on power outage

-ram cache for faster writes

Cons

-expensive

-if the card fails you need the same one to recover the array.
 

Software raid see's all the dries and does all the calculation on the cpu in the os. Some new ones like zfs and btrfs and much better than other like md on linux or the raid on windows.

 

Use hardware raid for performance(video editing, database)

Use basic software raid when doing basic raid like raid 1 of data you don't care about

Use better software raid(zfs and btrfs) when storing data you care about.

[EpicWolverine]

What about Windows Storage Spaces? I currently have an aging 3TB HDD, and while I have everything I can't easily redownload backed up to CrashPlan Central, I would like a local mirror to supplement this. Can I buy another 3TB HDD and create a RAID 1-like setup with my existing drive in Storage Spaces? Is there a better solution?