Me and my friend were discussing this the other day about how he said RAID is no longer needed. He said it was due to how big SSDs have gotten and that apparently you can replace sectors within them if a problem occurs which is why having an array is not needed.
I replied with the fact that arrays allow for redundancy that create a faster uptime if there are issues and drive needs to be replaced. And depending on what you are doing, that is more valuable than just doing the new thing. Especially because RAID allows redundancy that can replicate lost data if needed depending on the configuration.
What do you all think?
SSDs man, I personally still don’t trust them for primary storage. My data array is unraid, several spinning disks. Spinners just always work for me, there are gotchas of being jostled or turned off incorrectly, but if you treat them well they’ll last a real long time. Plus the double redundancy of my array and I’m very happy with it. (Plus I don’t see 20TB ssds on the market for 300 bucks either).
SSDs though wear out, they only have so many IOPS in them. I had some in a traditional raid and it just ate through them. Too many writes and I had 5/6 fail on me. I use them now as cache drives, for unraid you can set a faster drive to store data temporarily, and then it will move it off the cache drive later onto the main array, and that’s a level of risk I’m happy with.