The amount of risk of drives failing is not dependent of your raid config at all. ignoring excessive duty cycling. I believe you are misunderstanding the point I was making in my original reply. I’m claiming that these 32TB drives will reduce your risk of losing data than by raiding 2 16TB drives, given the same failure rate.
I’m uncomfortable storing 16TB worth of data on one drive
Example you have 20TB of data. What is safer?
- 2 16TB drives in raid0
- 1 32TB drive
This is completely irrelevant to your backup solution. You should have backups, of course, but I don’t see how that factors into my point? You have to put the data somewhere, and then back it up, where do you put it? I will always put it on as few physical drives as possible, to minimize the risk of drive failure over time so I don’t have to restore/re-stripe as often.
I’m claiming that these 32TB drives will reduce your risk of losing data than by raiding 2 16TB drives, given the same failure rate.
Assuming the probability of failure is the same, you’re right, running two drives doubles the risk of a drive failing.
However, if your single 32 TB drive fails, all data is gone and you have to rely on backup. If one of the 16 TB drives fails, you replace it and the RAID restores the data with much less hassle.
Both 16 TB drives failing at once is negligible (however, the RAID controller might).
If that is your whole point, you didn’t approach it right as you can see with all the downvotes.
You seemingly argued against RAID which was invented for data availability and performance. While it’s true, that RAID alone is no backup solution, having just a single drive is more hassle when it fails, so running multiple drives in a RAID allows for better handling despite the higher probability of having to swap a drive.
Another point you did not consider: larger drives have more sectors that can fail. While I have no data for this, a 32 TB drive is unlikely to have the same rate of failure as a 16 TB one - the larger drive will be more likely to fail (not as likely as one of two drives failing though).
