Jonathan Dowland wrote: > In brief my rationale is: without RAID, when a drive failure occurs I > lose access to my NAS until I've replaced the drive and restored the > files. I judge that the inconvenience of system downtime is outweighed > by the increased cost (upfront and running), complexity, and raised > failure frequency of deploying RAID. Everyone's mileage varies, of > course.
Sorry to answer a question that was not addressed to me, but I was just reading this topic as I had experience in the past few years with this topic in a project I worked on. IMO you should do RAID and probably consider doing backups. RAID is the most essential part, because you can replace a failed drive without too much effort. Most suitable are those cases with at least 4 drive bays as you can use RAID5 or similar. It is all about probability of failure. The probability of a disk to fail is avg. but it happens. The probability that 2 disks fail at the same time ... not really except you experience some kind of electric shock or you have a really bad luck. For this it is recommended to use backup. Some people go even further burning backups on disks (like blu-rays) because they fear EMP. My experience is that I replaced many failed disks in the raids in the past 15+y, but never had to recover from backup because of disk failure. I have used the back to restore data either because I accidentally deleted something or because I created a test copy of one of the systems. It all depends on how much risk you want to take. The truth is somewhere in the middle. For me personal information or business related files are important and go into backup and multimedia does not, but everything is on a RAID.
