Apparently, they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent... But

Apparently, they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent... But that was only introduced in 2010, so either the timeframe I was guessing at is wrong, or I'm misremembering what component it was. Could have been disk drives maybe.