Average Time To Recover A CPanel Server Drive Failure

As I have never used cPanel neither have whatsoever experience with control panels, in the process of ordering a couple of new server I am wondering what's the average recovery time after a server failure which involves data (ie. disk failure).

I am interested to understand this, because I need to choose between hardware raid or backup disk.

For example, at LiquidWeb (this is just one of the many managed providers i am evaluating) you can pay the same server 264$ with 2x250 hardware raid 1, and 219$ with 2x250 simple hard drives, where the second one is supposed to be a backup drive.

I am yet to ask, but on this servers most likely (at this prices) they do not have hot swappable disk drives where they can rebuild the array "live", so also if i choose raid hardware, in case of a disk failure, i face a downtime to bring down the server, rebuild the array, bring on the server, which I guess is something not less than 30-60 minutes downtime.

The advantage of this solution is that a disk failure keeps the system running, so you can schedule a maintenance window to replace the disk and rebuild the array, I guess.

On the other side, relying on a backup disk (and of course rsyncing data to an offsite server, i would do this anyway) you save 45$ each month, and disks after all do not fail every month.

If the main disk fails, they need to replace the disk, install again the server with what I suppose being a standard image (so let's figure a couple of hours, as they have a 30min hardware replacement sla), then you need to restore backups (which in my case are something like 20gigs). So I guess, on an average, it would take something like 4 hours downtime.

Am I correct ?

What would you reccomend as a solution with cpanel, taking into account the huge price difference ? Backup drive or Hardware raid ?

This would be for a single big website, not a hosting-company with resellers and customers environment, so I would value more the monthly saving, rather than the high availability, but of course I am interested to know what is the average time to recover a cpanel server after a drive failure.

Besides I have also another question, as I have never had a colocated server with raid hardware, so i do not know anything about this.

When a drive fails in a raid1 hardware environment, how the hosting provider gets notified ? I suppose it's not a led on the server to blink, as no one would see it.

So if you have software raid (like my computer at home) you get an email from mdadm with "warning, array degraded", so you know it quick and you can check it anytime doing a ' cat /proc/mdstat '. What about hardware raid?

My fear is that nobody notices my raid1 drive failure, the server keeps going on just a drive, then maybe the other drive fails, and it would be unpleasant: while a single drive failure would be obviously very easy to spot for me.