> > RAID controllers are completely unnecessary for SSD as they currently > exist.
Agreed. The best solution is not to buy cheap disks and not to buy RAID controllers now, imho.
In my own situation, I had a tight budget, high performance demand and a newish machine with RAID controller and HDDs in it as a starting point. So it was more a question of 'what can you do with a free raid controller and not much money' back in 2013. And it has worked very well. Still, I had hoped for a bit more from the cheaper SSDs though, I'd hoped to use fastpath on the controller and bypass the cache.
The way NVMe prices are going though, I wouldn't do it again if I was doing it this year. I'd just go direct to nvme and trash the raid controller. These sammy and intel nvmes are basically enterprise hardware at consumer prices. Heck, I'll probably put one in my next gaming PC.
Re: software raid.
I agree, but once you accept that software raid is now pretty much superior to hardware raid, you start looking at ZFS and thinking 'why the heck am I even using software raid?'