But this is why businesses spend so much on their RAID controllers. To make sure they're in warranty and that kind of thing doesn't happen.

Incidentally its also pretty great because no business buys them second hand without warranty. So they're usually available for half nothing.

I don't use raid cards right now but I do use fibre channel which is also dirt cheap second hand

3 weeks ago I had a controller failure in a manufacturing plant in Latin America. The contract with the manufacturer was to provide a replacement on site in 4 hours. Guess what, 8 hours later the technician with the replacement controller was still on the way.

With TrueNAS I can move my drives to any other computer with the right interface and they will just work. I did this in the past 10 years of using TrueNAS.

I can imagine but companies want to offload responsibility.

If the manufacturer is late they can blame them, after all your IT manager paid for 4hr support so they've covered their ass.

If your TrueNAS fails at work, it's your ass on the line :P

I totally agree these special drive formats are really annoying. In this case I'd probably keep a spare on hand myself.

Spending lots of money on hardware support doesn't guarantee it won't fail, or even that you will get replacements fast, it just guarantees that a contract exists saying something. As an architect we should engineer our solutions to cater for hardware failure.

I call this sort of thing a technical guarantee rather than a commercial guarantee