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I am getting much more behind ZFS RAID. It is very impressive. It is software RAID run by the OS. This is no longer a bad thing. The CPU and OS has hundreds of times more processing and RAM than RAID cards. There is a journal written that can be replayed upon power loss and commits are made to the disk in a way that data will never be corrupted. Everything on the disks is self-healing with error-correction checksummed. The OS can talk directly to the drives and their SMART status to understand drive state. You can run RAID on standard SATA controllers, and when your motherboard burns up, mount the drives in any other motherboard and on any other controller. You don't need to have hot-spares and lengthy rebuilds, you can have RAIDZ3 - three extra drives of parity - so it would take three drive failures to take out your disk array.

Then mirror the whole machine automatically with High-Availibility storage (HAST) and CARP in BSD. Backups are now just for when the whole place burns to the ground.