One of the servers we use at work lost of the drives in the RAID 5 array yesterday. Yes, the damn thing died on Christmas day. And yes, the server was located at my house. I thought that I would mention a couple of things that I learned:
1) Learn how to turn the alarm off!!! My god, the piercing alarm on the RAID controller card drove me nuts! Sadly, I did not figure out how to turn it off until I was researching it while I rebuilt the array. The alarm went off for 3 hours and fifteen minutes.
2) If you are using an array for production work, have a spare drive. It just so happens that the drives we use are Seagate SCSI-3 UltraWide 80GB 10K RPM hard drives. I can not go to my local Fry's, CompUSA, or CircuitCity and pick one of those up. While I found the drive on NewEgg, purchasing it on Christmas Day and expecting the drive to arrive within 24 hours was unrealistic. At best, I could have received the drive on Wednesday, December 27.
3) Before expecting the worst, rebuild the array to see if maybe the controller just lost the array before swapping out a drive. I was lucky, this was all that was required for my situation.