Raid 5 box failure

You generally should use the same card or housing, as they may or may not be compatible with others, and even with identical equipment there are issues and there is no sure thing.

What box are you considering? And how many drives, drive quality, and drive size?

Always remember that a raid array is NOT a backup, but a fault tolerant storage. You still need to do real backup to protect important data.

looking for a 4 drive raid 5 box with 4 3tb drives. How im meant to back up 9 tbs heaven knows given the cost. its only to store my media collection at the end of the day. I can tolerate the one drive failure tolerance but wheres the tolerance for the box?

There is no fault tolerance in most consumer raid boxes, not even redundant power. I tend to build my own raid arrays so I can replace parts if needed. It costs a little less, but it takes more administrative time. And I always put them on a good (APC) UPS.

In RAID 5 if one drive fails, and then an error is encountered on rebuild you can lose your data, so you really need to consider your backup options.

seems theres no way round losing half your drives to a separate backup to overcome box liability. Ok tx for giving me a better handle on it.