RAID 1 Software vs. Hardware question

Unless you're paying $150+ for a hardware RAID controller, the "hardware" RAID you're getting (built into the motherboard I assume?) is actually software RAID. If it says it only works with Windows, that's a dead giveaway that it's software RAID. It just inserts a hook in the BIOS boot routine so you can use it on the boot drive. From there on out, it's just an OS-level driver which does software RAID.

Not that there's anything wrong with software RAID. I actually think it's superior to hardware RAID in this day and age. Real hardware RAID is basically a computer on a board which does the RAID calculations and presents the array to the computer as a single virtual drive. This means if your raid controller dies, you have to replace it with an identical controller before you can access your data again. Companies using hardware RAID kept a few extra controllers in the closet just for such emergencies. A home user is highly unlikely to do so, and the controller you used may not be available for sale anymore in a few years when your controller dies. With software RAID, you just need to transfer the drives to a different machine which also supports the software RAID drivers. (The only reason hardware RAID existed was that back in the 1980s, doing the RAID 5 parity calculations could take like 80% of a desktop CPU's processing power. So it made sense to offload that work onto dedicated hardware. Nowadays a low-end i3 can do those calculations without blinking.)

That said, are you sure you need RAID? RAID is not a backup. RAID is for redundancy. A company which will lose millions of dollars of business every hour their file server is down wants to put it on a RAID. A hard drive dies, the file server keeps chugging along, and you can replace the drive later without disrupting business. Most home/school uses do not need the 100% uptime guarantee that RAID provides.

And even if you have RAID, you still need a backup. If you delete the wrong file off a RAID 1 array, it gets instantly deleted from both drives. So having RAID does not relieve you from needing to backup your files. For most home uses, you are better off with one drive as a OS+data drive, and a second drive as an always-on incremental/differential backup (this will backup differences, so you can run a backup every day or even every hour without taking up much more space than the original). Particularly important data should be backed up to a cloud data service or external drive which is unplugged and stored off-site (in case your house burns down).