G-Raid failure. I need HELP, PLEASE!

Matching make/models for a "backup" drive is totally unnecessary. For a RAID, yes, but not for simple backups. And if you have a backup drive(s), they should be backing up nightly, not sitting idle. If you have an archive drive, that could sit idle for some time, and shouldn't be allowed to. Then again, LTO tape backups are pretty bullet proof, and not as expensive as they used to be, for archiving.

I'm on target with my information about RAIDs. I'm a retired IT engineer, I worked with them for 30 years.

BenB wrote: Matching make/models for a "backup" drive is totally unnecessary. For a RAID, yes, but not for simple backups. And if you have a backup drive(s), they should be backing up nightly, not sitting idle. If you have an archive drive, that could sit idle for some time, and shouldn't be allowed to. Then again, LTO tape backups are pretty bullet proof, and not as expensive as they used to be, for archiving.

I'm on target with my information about RAIDs. I'm a retired IT engineer, I worked with them for 30 years.

No-one advocated matching drives Ben, certainly not for backup - in fact I was advocating the opposite based on a paper I read regarding the differing probabilities of failure for differing drive configurations. LTO is of course the ultimate but still out of reach for many people.

I'd be interested to hear more about your thoughts on RAID 1 being faster - every RAID 1 setup I've ever used has been the same or marginally slower than a single bare drive in the same scenario. The slowness has manifested in slightly laggy performance (the NLE not feeling quite so 'snappy') rather than out-and-out data transfer rates. Your information seems to contradict my experience, so I'm always up for learning!!

It is possible to get a similar read performance as RAID 0" if" the controller uses multiplexing to read data.
Here is a good example using the T3 from CalDigit:

MB/sec:
Single drive: 184 write / 181 read
2-drive mirror: 184 write / 198 read
3-drive mirror: 184 write / 271 read

A 2-drive mirror offers brief spikes of better performance than a single drive averaging 9% faster than a single drive—not nothing but not much either.
...
Mirroring generally runs at the speed of a single drive or a bit slower for writes (all drives can be written simultaneously, but there is some overhead). A mirror can offer higher read speed, but not necessarily.