"which may have been what you found?"
That's the chip. It was in an electronics magazine I get.
Well, mass storage failure can be addressed with RAID, say RAID 5. With SATA drives being hot-pluggable, the drives could be packaged in a holder with a LED. When the system detects a bad drive, it turns the LED red and sends you an e-mail letting you know a drive failed. You buy a new one, pull the dead one and plug the new one in. The system them makes a new RAID set and copies the data. Nothing lost and it isn't all that difficult for a non-technical type to deal with.