What is a hardware RAID?
RAID systems used to be expensive, but FireWire began to change that shortly after Apple introduced it in 1998. FireWire RAID systems today can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars for a JBOD setup (Just a Bunch Of Drives), scaling upwards to more than US$10,000 for as much as 2.52 terabytes. That’s more than 2,500 GB for those keeping score at home. With many of those systems, it’s as easy as plugging the drive in, and saving data as either RAID 1 or RAID 0 drive, and using it like any external storage device. Consumer pricing on FireWire RAID products has reached new lows, and places the power of RAID into the price-range of more people. This is in part because today’s Macs and PCs are powerful enough to make software-driven RAID usable. The inexpensive RAID solutions are almost always software-driven, and that works quite well for many applications. Hardware RAID, on the other hand, is a bit pricier, but can offer more flexibility, and greater reliability. Hardware RAID sys
