Originally Posted By: peter

Eh? RAID5 only causes heartbreak if two or more drives fail in quick succession. This is a slightly increased risk compared to simple mirroring -- where your heart only gets broken if the two failing drives are the two halves of the same mirror set -- but still a vastly decreased risk compared to JBOD operation. IMO the risk is close enough to zero that you'd have to search really hard to find someone whose RAID5 had failed in a situation where RAID6 or RAID1 would have saved the day.

In fairness, I think at least a few of the "Help! I'm screwed!" email calls for help I cite in last post were folks who only figured out they had a problem when that 2nd drive failed. But I did see one single-drive failure where restore on to a hot spare just would not complete. Also one case where all drives were ultimately shown to be fine but where controller just lost its freaking mind. With RAID1 you have some hope of just plugging a drive in and seeing a file system.
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Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.