Hardly. Hard disk failure rates are about 1% per year. For many purposes (basically, anything where this isn't the only copy of valuable data), that's acceptabl

Hardly. Hard disk failure rates are about 1% per year. For many purposes (basically, anything where this isn't the only copy of valuable data), that's acceptable. Amazon S3 costs around $1/gb/year. Let's say it has 0% chance of data loss Suppose I can store something without any replication. Cost drops to $0.50/gb/year, 2% chance of losing all my data. If the value of my data is less than $25/gb, it makes financial sense to go for the unreliable option. Much of my data is worth less than $25/gb. photos, video, old mail. Storing it on RAID is a waste of money. besides, the chance of me deleting everything by human error is often much higher than the chance of hardware failure. and some decent portion of those failures come with advance warning, so that you can save at least some of the data.