HP MSA – Diagnosing Failing Disks in HP Modular Smart Array

Unless you enabled the battery backed cache and have a cache at all (not all HP SmartArrays come with that anymore, which boggles the mind) then I don't see much difference between the two. Software RAID is ever so slightly more fragile in extremity, but for nearly all running should perform just as fast. If not faster.

Your 4x2TB option should work. You may have to play with GUID partition tables to make all of that presentable as a single 8TB volume, though. A better option in my opinion if you insist on RAID 0 for the dataset, is to create a RAID 1 OS Logical Drive drive of say, 200GB and a second Logical Drive set to RAID 0, comprised of the remaining space. Smart Array controllers allow you mix RAID levels on the same set of drives. At least this will protect your OS setup, even if the data is not important.