Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

Lally Singh writes: With the increasing storage and nondecreasing probability of failure on HDDs, ZDNet makes a decent case that RAID 5 won't cut it:

Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we'll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you'll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE.

So the read fails. And when that happens, you are one unhappy camper. The message "we can't read this RAID volume" travels up the chain of command until an error message is presented on the screen. 12 TB of your carefully protected — you thought! — data is gone. Oh, you didn't back it up to tape? Bummer!

Apparently RAID 6 isn't far behind? I'll keep the ZFS plug short. Go ZFS. There, that was it.