I'd be very nervous if I lost two drives so closely together, especially since they were on different controllers.
And since throwing out 'raid' by itself is a misnomer, let's break down RAID levels.
RAID 0 - striping, no parity. No matter the size of the array, any single drive failure will result in loss of the array.
RAID 1 - mirroring. Two disks, where writes to one are duplicated on the 2nd disk. Can tolerate either drive failing without data loss, but at a 100% storage "cost".
RAID 5 - striping with parity. Has the performance gains of RAID 0, but can tolerate a drive failure without data loss.
The higher RAID levels are beyond the budget of a home studio, and unnecessary in my mind. Ultimately any RAID can fail horribly, if you've ever lost 2 drives on a RAID 5, or had a controller go bonkers and toast data. If one's dwelling catches fire, a RAID 100 will go up in flames as quickly as anything else.
OFFSITE backup solutions are key in my book. 50GB storage is $50 annually with Amazon's new cloud service. It's marketed as an mp3 storage locker, but I've been able to upload SONAR files into the "my documents" folder without any problem.
Edit: Oh, and I'm glad all your data came back. It is pretty cool seeing a RAID system rebuild from parity.
post edited by osd - 2011/04/08 21:49:52