and am seeing it raise concerns about raid 5 or RaidZ1. The article it links to goes into detail about UREs and the likelihood that during a possible raid rebuild you will hit a URE and the raid will fall on it's face.
What format do you guys suggest? What do you use? The data is honestly only important in short spurts before it makes it to a deeper storage so a failure isn't going to cripple the business but I still don't want to make the right investment.
For a business (assuming 8-16 hrs/day of 'work time') why don't you schedule a scrub to occur nightly? or weekly? That should result in reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly early warning if something funny is going on. 5 drive raid z1 is perhaps a bit 'iffy' but I do that personally because I have more mirrors of the data than just the one. That said raidz2 or better can be more performant as well, which is nice. I wouldn't recommend raidz1 with drives larger than 4tb.
The 1-year failure rate of 4tb+ drives is best described as 'scary.' If you are really paranoid, I'd recommend ordering drives one or two at a time or from different vendors.
I have been unfortunate enough to experience a failure where 3-4 WD Velociraptors failed within days of each other. In that case, the data was gone forever, and had to be recovered from alternate media. And those were only 600 gb "enterprise" storage drives.