> just every day you're in danger of losing a drive by a small statistical amount. Which is why for important data I always use some sort of RAID (or cloud syn

> just every day you're in danger of losing a drive by a small statistical amount. Which is why for important data I always use some sort of RAID (or cloud syncing). If I lose a drive I won't lose all my data (presumably though if I bought both drives at the same time there is a chance that both could fail at the same or close to the same time). > That said, if you're running your ReadyNAS with raid 10 (mirrored drives in a RAID 0 config) ReadyNAS and other products use a special type of RAID that is actually kind of clever (that will use all space regardless of disk size). I know many would criticize the special RAID but I've had more issues with Linux software RAID than I have had with ReadyNAS (nothing related to data loss). But suffice it to say if 1 drive fails then in theory the data should still be ok (at least that is what their claim to fame is). My personal opinion - I feel like the ReadyNAS will die before the drives. I'm not saying they couldn't or won't die - but I feel like that would be highly unlikely and even more unlikely for more than 1 to fail at once. Maybe I'm just paranoid - but when I worked on my last SAN it felt like the company used the cheapest possible drives with a short MTBF for the simple reason that my employer would have to keep using them and keep paying for their warranty service (this wasn't a big name like Dell).