[beachstartup]

in my opinion, raid 10 is by far the best if you have to support the operations of a production site in a real world environment. just keep spare controllers and drives handy. it's just a matter of swapping out failures.

three cost levers: capacity, speed, and downtime.

basically, at some point you will begin to realize the cheapest cost is the capacity itself, everything else is an order of magnitude more difficult to justify. downtime and slowness are simply unacceptable, whereas buying more stuff is perfectly acceptable and quite feasible solution in an enterprise environment.

[hobs]

Exactly.

I work with a number of medium sized businesses of which you can clearly tell who have had and who havent had major downtime due to these types of hardware failures.

Many people who have never experienced issues have no interest in even forming a basic DR plan, but the ones who have just start throwing money at you the moment you mention it.

Buying more stuff is WAY cheaper than slowness and downtime, and penny pinching on this count is going to cause so much additional heartache for what will in the end cost more anyway.