Just got done rebuilding the web server that hosts this here website.
Make a long story short, the box that has been hosting my blog and our family site (my wife hates the word blog, so I can't call it that) was an old machine comprised of various canabalized parts from my AMD K6-2 super socket 7 days. It had since evolved into a dual homed 100XT Asus A7V board running an Athlon 750. Not bad for a little server box. Life was good for a couple of years, until my 30 GB drive locked up and went bye bye.
Fortunately, I have a 120GB external USB 2.0 drive that I use for my daily backups, so no harm was made, save for the pita it is to rebuild my machine, reinstall the OS, Active Directory, IIS, SQL, you name it.
Well, it occured to me that a little redundancy wouldn't hurt anyone, so I picked up two 120GB 7200 RPM drives with 8MB cache for $59 a pop. I don't know what truck they fell off of, and I didn't ask. 3 different hardware RAID controllers later I am running at RAID1, full mirrors.
What this provides is high availablity in that should one of the drives fail, I need only swap out the bad drive. All data is preserved on the good disk. Since the chances of both disks failing at once is very unlikely, this is a pretty safe bet.
So, we've been up now for at least 2 months with no problems. Maybe I'll post a pic of this little rig some time.