That is just a specific type of drive failure and only certain software RAID solutions are able to even detect corruption through the use of checksums. Typical “dumb” RAID will happily pass on corrupted data returned by the drives.
RAID only serves to prevent downtime due to drive failure. If your system has very high uptime requirements and a drive just dropping out must not affect the availability of your system, that’s where you use RAID.
If you want to preserve data however, there are much greater hazards than drive failure: Ransomware, user error, machine failure (PSU blows up), facility failure (basement flooded) are all similarly likely. RAID protects against exactly none of those.
Proper backups do provide at least decent mitigation against most of these hazards in addition to failure of any one drive.
If love your data, you make backups of it.
With a handful of modern drives (<~10) and a restore time of 1 week, you can expect storage uptime of >99.68%. If you don’t need more than that, you don’t need RAID. I’d also argue that if you do indeed need more than that, you probably also need higher uptime in other components than the drives through redundant computers at which point the benefit of RAID in any one of those redundant computers diminishes.
That is just a specific type of drive failure and only certain software RAID solutions are able to even detect corruption through the use of checksums. Typical “dumb” RAID will happily pass on corrupted data returned by the drives.
RAID only serves to prevent downtime due to drive failure. If your system has very high uptime requirements and a drive just dropping out must not affect the availability of your system, that’s where you use RAID.
If you want to preserve data however, there are much greater hazards than drive failure: Ransomware, user error, machine failure (PSU blows up), facility failure (basement flooded) are all similarly likely. RAID protects against exactly none of those.
Proper backups do provide at least decent mitigation against most of these hazards in addition to failure of any one drive.
If love your data, you make backups of it.
With a handful of modern drives (<~10) and a restore time of 1 week, you can expect storage uptime of >99.68%. If you don’t need more than that, you don’t need RAID. I’d also argue that if you do indeed need more than that, you probably also need higher uptime in other components than the drives through redundant computers at which point the benefit of RAID in any one of those redundant computers diminishes.