Great article, I've learnt the hard way myself so I feel your pain over the data loss.
One thing I'd add to your thorough write up is to consider the disks you put into any RAID machine. I've had a pair of Seagate disks bought together fail within hours of each other (after several years of identical use) . If they'd both been in a RAID 5 set I would have lost everything before the array rebuilt after the first failure.
Now I aim to source disks separately so they come from different manufacturing batches (and even go for different makes of disk if the array allows)
Great article, I've learnt the hard way myself so I feel your pain over the data loss.
One thing I'd add to your thorough write up is to consider the disks you put into any RAID machine. I've had a pair of Seagate disks bought together fail within hours of each other (after several years of identical use) . If they'd both been in a RAID 5 set I would have lost everything before the array rebuilt after the first failure.
Now I aim to source disks separately so they come from different manufacturing batches (and even go for different makes of disk if the array allows)
This is a GREAT tip. I'll definitely take that into account when I upgrade the disks to WD Red :)