Storage Spaces is significantly more than just software RAID. Windows (the NT variants, so not Win 9x or 2K Pro) has had software RAID as far back as NT4 and maybe even 3.51, I can't remember off the top of my head. But yes, Storage Spaces is a new concept to the previous software RAID options that Windows had. Basically storage spaces allow you to create virtual disks, which are RAID volumes that aren't mapped 1:1 to physical disks. So say you have 3 1TB drives (not including the system drive, you can't include the system drive in a Storage Space). You could take those 3 drives and create a 3TB pool. Within that pool you could, for example, create a 500GB mirrored virtual disk, a 1TB RAID 5 virtual disk, and put the remainder of the space into a non-resilient virtual disk. Then at some point in the future you could add more disks to your system and, on the fly, extend the sizes of any or all of your existing virtual disks. You could even completely replace all 3 of your 1TB disks with 2TB disks without needing to destroy / recreate your virtual disks and volumes.
Storage spaces also supports things like de-duplication, thin provisioning, hot spares, and storage tiering (which allows you to combine SSD's and traditional spindles in a single virtual disk and Storage Spaces will keep hot data on the SSD's and lesser used data on the spindles). Sure there are enterprise storage systems that do all of this, but we're not talking about the enterprise here, we're talking about features that you have available to you on your desktop PC. And yes many desktop motherboards nowadays have Intel storage controllers that support RAID but if you're comparing features and flexibility, it's no contest that Storage Spaces is a far more feature-rich option. And yes hardware RAID generally is faster than software RAID but that doesn't mean you'll notice it. In fact if you're accessing your RAID volumes over a typical gigabit home network you absolutely will NOT notice a performance impact, as the network is your bottleneck.
Personally I have about 12 disks of varying sizes spread across 2 file servers and a couple of external USB 3.0 storage enclosures connected to those servers. Historically I'd created hardware RAID volumes using the onboard Intel RAID chipset and I hated that anytime I wanted to add or upgrade disks, it was a destructive process to the existing RAID volumes and a huge pain in my ass of moving data around. When Storage Spaces came along I disabled all the onboard Intel stuff and instead carved up all my storage in Storage Spaces and it's been so much better and easier to work with. And since these are file servers on my network, the network speed is the bottleneck so any argument over hardware Vs software RAID performance is a moot point; data transferred at 112 MB/s between my desktop and files servers when I using the Intel RAID controllers, and data still transfers at 112 MB/s after switching over to Storage Spaces.
Sorry this is so long but all the comments thus far have been about software RAID and since the OP's comments were about Storage Spaces I wanted to clarify that Storage Spaces is more than just RAID. And when we're talking about home-use desktop PC environments there are some significant storage management features built right into the OS that would cost serious money to find in an equivalent hardware solution. Anyone that has a lot of storage to manage, as is typically the case with photographers, would be ill-advised to quickly dismiss Storage Spaces without first fully understanding what it offers and how that matches up to what's personally important to you based on your own storage management needs. My own setup is living proof that it's made my life easier with zero downside.
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