> The above specifications are about Performance. If maximum Reliability > is the goal, look at the MTBF in the specifications. If the Design > Engineers have done their job, and the Manufacturing Engineers maintain > high Quality Control, the result should be a quality component. I am sorry but for quite a while already, both PATA/SATA/SCSI drives have been sharing the same manufacturing technology. So while the specifications of the different disks are different, the reliability factor has been proven to be the same across the board. You must have missed the thread on the Google report on various drives that they use which is also what I see in my previous job at an ISP that has over 40 million mailboxes. SCSI is only needed when disk i/o is really critical and that is assuming you cannot use large battery backed up RAM drives/write caches to mitigate the slower disk performance. No matter what kind of drive you have, if you get constant changes in temperature, that disk is going to die much sooner than its supposed lifetime. > > As has been pointed out in this thread, RAID is *not* a substitute for > backups. RAID is intended to keep the box up and running. Valuable data > should always be stored off site, in removable drives, or via the WAN. Who says? You? I like to have an online offsite RAID backup server. Is there an ONE TRUE WAY OF BACKUP?