Quote:
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.


I wouldn't say it increases the need for backup. If a RAID card dies, its the same as having a SCSI or IDE controller die. The hard drive temperature issue is a concern if your building it yourself, but not for systems engineered for holding 14 or whatever drives.

Quote:
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.


Thats one thing I came to appreciate about the Compaq storage engineers. They realized this situation sucks, and have never caused this to be the case with the RAID controllers in use in the Proliant servers. You could take a RAID setup from a 1995 system running the first RAID controller they made, and plug it into a 2007 card. When Compaq bought DEC, they also began working on interoperability between the servers and external SAN devices. You could take the disks out of a Proliant and plug them into the MSA series SAN enclosures.