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Or does each manufacturer add his own bells and whistles to their RAID adapters, forcing you to stay with their brand?
It's worse than that. I had a friend whose RAID card died, and the exact same card was no longer available. Buying the next card in the line from the same manufacturer turned out to be useless, as it had a completely different way of formatting the drives. He literally lost all the data on the RAID.
RAID is not a panacea. RAID does not allow you to skip backups. In fact, in my opinion, RAID increases your need to make regular backups because it increases the number of possible failure points related to the data you've stored on it. It also increases the likelihood of individual disk failure because you usually cram the drives tightly together into a case, increasing the heat. (So don't ever build a RAID unless you have a cooling fan blowing on the drives.)
RAID has only a few actual uses in my opinion:
- Making a large single volume that is bigger than the largest available disk drive.
- Faster data access.
- Ability to have continuous uptime when a single hard disk in the array fails (at the expense of heartburn and worry as you pray for no additional failures while waiting for the replacement drive to be shipped).
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