The short and sweet answer is Yes, because you will never know when your hard disk will fail.

I just got my server up last Friday (brand new server). On monday the hard disk failed, no offense to Dell, I have used Dell desktop for years and my hard disk has never failed. You just never know.

So my first setup was without RAID and I had to spend half a day in the data center recovering my server. Isn’t it wonderful if there is RAID? You just have to swap the failed hard disk with a new hard disk. And the best part is you don’t even get a down time.

So RAID it!! No question asked. Your server downtime and the time spent recovering your server is worth the extra hard disk.