[wongarsu]

You want your drives to fail at different times! Which means you want your load to be unbalanced, from a reliability standpoint. If you put the same load on every drive (like in a traditional RAID5/6) then the drives are likely to fail at around the same time. Especially if you don't go out of your way to get drives from different manufacturing batches. But if you misbalance the amount of work the drives get they accumulate wear and tear at different rates and spend different amounts of time in idle, leading them to fail at wildly different times, giving you ample time to rebuild the raid.

I'd still recommend anyone to have two parity drives (which unraid does support)

[riddley]

I often see these discussions and "drive failure" is often mentioned and I wish the phrase was instead "unrecoverable read error" because that's the more accurate phrase. To me, "drive failure" conjures ideas of completely failed devices. An unrecoverable read error can and does happen on our bigger and bigger drives with regularity and will stop most raid rebuilds in their tracks.

[wongarsu]

"unrecoverable read error" or "defects" is probably a better framing because it highlights the need to run regular scrubs of your RAID. If you don't search for errors but just wait until the disk no longer powers on you might find out that by then you have more errors than your RAID configuration can recover from