Software mirroring is slower and adds workload to the CPU. However, depending on the load, this may not make much of a difference.
Also, (at least on W2K mirroring) the information used by the OS to do the mirroring is stored on the primary drive. If that hard drive goes bad in the area that stores that info., you have to do low-level editing of the disk to recover to the mirrored drive. In the case I dealt with this was a not very fun, 5 hour call to MS PSS. Even when the other drive was back up, the volume mapping was corrupted (D: was W:, C: was Q:, etc.). Ended up reloading the server. Don't take this as an absolute technical fact since I'm going off memory here.
Moral of the story: stay away from software mirroring.
I have a W2K server with a software mirrored drive set, and I have had both the primary and mirrored drive go bad at one time or another - gone through four drives in the past two years, in fact. I never experienced this problem - I simply pulled the bad drive, stuck in a new one, told the PC's BIOS which drive to boot from, and up it came. Rebuilt the mirror and everything was fine again.
Rebuilding the mirror, however, slows the server to a crawl for hours.
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