JJ made one point I think is excellent and worth elaboration, and one that I would disagree with.
The excellent point is this:
In the end, you need a backup of the RAID anyway
Even if your RAID is perfect, it only protects you from a hardware failure, it doesn't protect you from: theft, fire, accidental overwriting of important files, etc. So when you think about RAID as a "solution", remember that it's a solution to a very narrow problem, hard disk hardware failure.
Which brings me to the part of JJ's comments that I want to take issue with.
RAID only provides 1 potential advantage, and then only when it's working well: speed of "recovery"..
I don't think that's quite right. While that is certainly a strength of raid -- what I think raid does far better than any other solution is reduce to near zero the size of data loss due to hard disk hardware failure, and allow uninterrupted processing even in the face of hard disk hardware failure.
That is not a trivial thing for some working environments. Just compare RAID to any other backup tool (online cloud, "realtime" file synchronization, etc.), and imagine a case where you are dealing with critical data being generated/processed at a high volume. A sudden hard drive crash will result in a non-trivial amount of irrecoverable data with an online backup solution or a file synchronization tool, because they simply do not keep up with data written to the hard drive in real time.
So it's not hard to imagine working environments where one would want to avoid downtime during a hard disk hardware fault, and would not want to lose ANY data during such faults (which after all are far more common than fire or theft). In these scenarios there simply is no viable alternative to RAID.
A hard disk crash remains one of the more likely unpleasant events that a computer owner will encounter.. RAID is the only true preventative solution to that very real program. Other tools only provide the means to recover from such an event with varying degrees of loss of time, effort, and data. Though hopefully if you've set up your other tools well and use them wisely, you can minimize the loss of data and the effort required to get back up and running.
Having said all that -- If we all agree that RAID is not a complete solution, and that you need an online backup tool and a versioning backup tool, and a drive imaging tool to let you go back in time, and your work environment is such that losing a few hours of data and a few hours of your time recovering from a hard drive crash is not the end of the world, then doing without RAID doesn't seem like a big deal.
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