Xserve and RAID 50 - lose data?

I am getting ready to set up our xserve raid into a raid 50, raid 5 on both side of the xserve raid and stripe it as a raid 0 with disk utility on the xserve. But what happens if the xserve completely dies? Is there any easy way to recreate the raid 0 without losing all of the data?

RAID 50 does not protect you. 0 is striping! If one half of your RAID somehow becomes unreadable, everything is gone! That is not security that is a severe risk you're taking. This will protect you from failure of a single drive on each side. Two faulty drives on one side and you're completely gone.
You may want to use RAID 51 which doies RAID 5 within the 7 drives of one controller and mirrors them to the other RAID 5 on the second controller.
This will protect you from failure of a single drive on either side. Two faulty drives on one side and you're half gone, you still have the other half of the mirror, so you could first rebuild the RAID 5 and then rebuild the mirror. (Would take some time I guess...)
I would suggest having one side as RAID 5 plus hotspare, that will protect you from the failure of a single drive on that side, but will autorebuild, reducing the time-at-risk when that drive died until it gets replaced by a new hot spare.
Then use some backup software like rsync or anything else to backup to the second RAID 5. That will also protect you from accidentally deleted files, filesystem corruption, and hopefully controller faults.
None of these methods will protect your data in case of a fire or water damage in your "data center" unless you also have an off-site backup.
Please do not confuse the terms RAID and drive-mirror with "Backup". They are NOT universally interchangeable. This sadly is a very common mistake even among so called IT-professionals and Consultants.
MacLemon

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Xserve and RAID 50 - lose data?

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