If it's shut down properly, fine. Improper shutdown = faulted array.

I've been doing software RAIDs for >15 years now, IT work for >30. At one time ~8,000 users. Never had an issue with it. You can just pick up the drives and drop them in any box and they'll start working. No muss, no fuss. Even in Windows. If you do this in Windows, I'd advise having a separate boot drive, but that's just to make moving it to completely different hardware easier.

Granted, I wouldn't trust Windows to anything mission critical, which is why my personal stuff and my office's back-end are all BSD or Linux servers. FreeNAS is an amazing tool, btw.

Which doesn't address my point--if Windows doesn't shut down properly the array faults. I've seen too many rebuilds to perfectly good arrays this way. (Windows hung on shutdown and so never wrote out the flag that says the array is ok. Thus on the next boot it's considered faulted.)

Loren Pechtel Again, after 15 years of doing this, using absolute garbage equipment, in areas where the power grid is quite unstable, I've never encountered the situation you are describing, even with Win2k3. Perhaps it could happen, but I've never encountered it. Then again I'm all *nix and leave Windows for the user workstations only.

I have however been called to assist others with: bad tape drives, bad tape backups, bad cloud backups, bad RAID controllers, plenty of bad HDDs, lightning-damaged equipment, fire-damaged equipment, flooded equipment and no spare parts for any of it on-site. After a hurricane or earthquake you're not going to be able to just overnight in parts either, that's if you can even get ahold of parts for 15-25 year old systems in any timely manner.

Being able to take a pile of drives from one system and put them into completely different hardware, especially with how pissy Windows is about hardware differences, has been a major life saver for some of these organizations.

Same here. My main server at home uses a Windows Storage Space and I've had a few unclean reboots. The array has never needed to be re-built.

I do have a separate boot drive with Windows installed (on a NVMe drive). The array is 4 6TB drives.

I guess they must have fixed it at some point after I quit using software arrays.