One thing between SW and HW Raid, you can't just compare them without understand how you are going to deploy them.
The greatest advantage to H/W Raid is often on the following features which are mostly not meant for consumers
- Performance: This is the only one that is most relevant to consumers. Recent consumers demand alot on the performance. H/W Raid offload the computation required for RAID. More Raid 1 and 0 are much less computationally intensive than Raid 5 and 6. Hence the benefit is less if you choose Raid 0, 1 and their variants.
- External interfaces: H/W Raid offers end-users the opportunity to connect external devices normally via backplanes. Such feature is mostly not required by consumers and meant to cater the Enterprise users. With an expander, such as SAS Expander that comes with an external enclosure, it can potentially goes up to 128 devices.
- Battery backed cache: Unless you are using a server class mainboard, chances you will not get Battery cached cache on the RAID components. Enterprise H/W Raid offerings often support Battery Backed Cache which allow for data written from the OS but not written into the harddisk be kept residual in the cache modules until main power comes back. Such is features to allow maximum performance from the storage array and still able to protect against power failure scenario.
Having systems nowadays are alot more powerful than 10 years back, the performance margin between S/W and H/W Raid have diminished, but still H/W Raid do excel in parity calculation for large number of disks array.
There are some articles that I have read that choose S/W raid over H/W raid. But some are not broad enough in my opinion. The risk of flexibility and redundancies are only on the storage components aspect and did not look into higher level of redundancies like multiple systems failover, multiple H/W cards manual backup and normally lower operational issues when coming to configuration and maintenance. It requires more skillset to handle software configurational changes as oppose to less complicated and less error-prone configuration changes in the H/W Raid's firmware, which are more or less fixed and requires less education to system engineers. Not all system engineers are proficient unix or windows engineers.
However I have to admit the cost on the storage domain when using H/W Raid is definitely higher when you solely look at storage components. You need to be able to find an exact H/W Raid card replacement in failure events, provided it is even possible to shift the arrays over without rebuilding (not all RAID cards offers such feature). You need to backup constantly which mean you need a good backup infrastructure. You probably need an extra system running side by side for high availability in case of system failure. The cost is high, but if you measure against the skill sets requires to hire better system engineers, and more complicated S/W Raid scenarios, the cost quickly amortise against all components and becomes marginally or maybe better less than S/W Raid on long run. One year worth of a good system engineer is worth more than a couple good H/W Raid cards, and is one system engineer sufficient ?
Bottomline is the comparison between H/W Raid and S/W Raid should be considered in broader terms use one for best fit scenarios. Consumers are better off in S/W Raid, but end-user need to be savvy to handle it properly. H/W Raid are straightforward and better performant but requires a higher upfront cost.
As home user, if your intention is just performance, your recent option is go get a SSD. You will get more performance than Raid a pair of magnetic hard disk via RAID 0 with much higher risks and complexity. Besides the performance you get out of RAID 0 is not ideally good depending on what your usage patterns are on the storage system. Those benchmarks are geared on telling you on how better are specific RAID, but doesn't really fit into your use case most of the time. Just best guess gauge in my opinion.
How many consumer end-users will reach DQ=32 during 90% of their daily use cases ? If you can reach DQ=5, it will be super rare for most. Common DQ for most consumers are between 0 and 1, especially for laptop users.
