Yes Windows has had RAID for a long time. There has been various limitations. I don't think you can boot a RAID 0 volume, for instance. It's certainly not as flexible as Linux's model, but Windows usually isn't.
As far as hardware RAID controllers, at least you get a battery-backed write cache that will "just work" without the OS, right? As in, you don't need to boot the OS to finish flushing. Or maybe I've just bought into the hardware RAID marketing. It does seem simpler, as in less to deal with, to let the card do it and just present whatever volumes desired to the OS.
My time playing with hardware RAID cards is over. My disks spent their time dropping on different builds (even with TLER disks only). For a home NAS, a synology style linux software RAID with regular data scrubbing is the peace of mind solution. For the cache problem, a cheap UPS that lasts the few minutes required to gracefully shut down is a good enough solution. As for performance, my bottleneck is the 1 gigabit port on my laptop anyway. And I don't see any improvement on the horizon for that anyway.
As far as hardware RAID controllers, at least you get a battery-backed write cache that will "just work" without the OS, right? As in, you don't need to boot the OS to finish flushing. Or maybe I've just bought into the hardware RAID marketing. It does seem simpler, as in less to deal with, to let the card do it and just present whatever volumes desired to the OS.