Y’all must’ve been doing something wrong with your hardware raid to have so many problems. Anecdotally, as an admin for 20+ years, I’ve never had a significant issue with hardware raid. The exception might be the Sun 3500 arrays. Those were such a problem and we had dozens of them. No lost data, but so many controller issues. I just left some of them beeping for a while in the server room since data was still being served.
Of course at the enterprise level we have sufficient redundancies built in, but I also use both hardware and software raid at home. No issues with either really.
They were olde by the time I got to administer them and they were failing every so often. They were a pain to work with as I recall, but again no lost data. They would beep with no issues sometimes. One thing that wasn’t their fault was a previous admin had set them up in threes with all but one disk in a raid5 array. They were wondering why performance was crap and one array would just drop every week like clockwork.
Took a while, but I mirrored (VVM) the data off on spare 3500s set up properly. They ran okay then. It was just ancient storage. Glad to work on netapps now. So much smoother and sophisticated storage compared to the olden days. lol