raid 5 recovery

[Tuttle]

Hardware RAID will recover completely from a single drive failure.

The limitation you've been reading about is where you do RAID entirely in software (ie Windows Disk Management) -- during the boot process there's no RAID support at all, so if the single drive the machine is relying on at that point fails, the machine won't boot.

[Tuttle]

Hardware RAID will recover completely from a single drive failure.

There should be a caveat here: "...as long as your RAID controller does its job and doesn't forget that the array exists." We've had a RAID 5 array die completely from a single drive failure; the controller ignored the preconfigured hot spare drive and just fell over completely. After a reboot, no array defined.

RAID is not a substitute for backups. It increases availability but that's it.