Softraid works pretty well. Performance overhead is minimal. It actually alternates drives on reads. Monitoring is a bit of a weak spot. mdadm uses email only AFAIK.

The only thing that needs to be off the array is the boot sector itself. This can lead to adventures as packagers don't realize there is more than one bootsector to update.

On top of Box's article, consider the source of the drives. Newegg's comments section consistently show a 10% - 15% defect rate. I consider this a strong indication that their repackaging of bare drives is inadequate. I've now switched to Amazon who manages to ship retail boxed drives for the same or less. (I did consider getting an enterprise grade drive for a moment, but they don't seem to fare much better than regular drives at the hands of Newegg. This would have been for mechanical robustness only, the extra alphabet soup features did not come to mind.)