Comment tradeoffs (Score 1) 359
As with anything else where there are multiple popular choices, there are trade-offs. There are reasons both options exist. For a home user, I would recommend software RAID, though.
1. Hardware RAID makes it easier and safer to RAID your boot device.
2. As others have said, hardware RAID ties you to a particular hardware implementation. That's fine if you have a data center with a lot of duplicate hardware and sparing, but not so good if you're a home user.
3. Hardware RAID limits you to the RAID levels that the hardware implements. Especially for cheap controllers and/or integrated controllers. Software RAID tends to be more flexible.
4. Hardware RAID offloads some of the work from the host CPU to a dedicated controller. For CPU-intensive workloads, that can be an advantage.
5. For certain RAID levels and hardware RAID architectures, hardware RAID can save you I/O bandwidth. The CPU only needs to send a certain amount of I/O to the RAID-card, which then can send more I/O to the actual back-end drives. For really large I/O workloads, software RAID is more likely to saturate I/O bandwidth.
This is not likely to be an issue for home users, though.
Bottom line: for home users, I would recommend software RAID.