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?
Different purposes true, but not exclusively. RAID only has effect on drive failure specifically. If downtime is intolerable then it’s not the right solution to just use RAID and you should look into total redundancy of the hardware and more. It also comes with performance bottlenecks or improvements depending on the setup, that’s another factor to take into account. So in the end it really depends on your requirements and backups can actually serve as an alternative, depending on your setup and as long as it meets your RTO