The problem lies when you end up chasing down eol hardware on eBay and similar . I ' ve been through that with several setups . One we had a similar machine that we could decommission and use to recover the other machine . In the other hand we spent a week hunting down a same era controller that could restore the raid into functional order . I don ' t like hardware raid . Last time I had to use it , they had on site tech to replace the raid controller that refused to recover a raid 1 with single failed disk . and the new controller of course restored the raid 1 . From the empty drive over the full one . Hardware raid has some useful places . But as a rule . I don ' t like it . Completely agree with raid 5 . It has no proper place anywhere today . The chance of compound failures during recovery are too high . Even with small raids I recommend buying different brands and style . I ' ve got a story about a 4 drive Raid 10 where all drives died the same week . I can only expect it to be worse the more drives you have .