I use software RAID 1 to mirror my data across two IDE drives. It doesn't protect me against mistakenly deleting data myself - but I've been working without protection from that except occasional backups for so many years that I very seldom make those kinds of mistakes on such a scale as to really hurt myself anymore. It has protected me on one occasion from exactly the failure it's designed to protect me from: catastrophic failure of one drive. And on that occasion, it paid for its cost in power, hardware, software, and setup time. That doesn't mean anything either way about whether it's appropriate as the default for everybody.
no subject