>> I don't know, man... Backing up spinning disk to... spinning disk? Is
>> that such a sensible idea?
> 
> Mirroring (or duplexing) provides a pretty good degree of data protection 
> because the odds of both drives dying at the same time are pretty small.
> 
> It's been used for a very long time.

This is not the same as a backup.

RAID will protect you from physical failure of a single drive. It will 
not protect you if you accidentally delete a file, or if some virus 
infects your PC and deletes your stuff, or if the filesystem becomes 
corrupted somehow, or...

> But I also back up directories from several systems to other systems 
> using rsync.

Now that's more like it.

> Well, I didn't say anything about shutting the drive down.

An often-encountered backup strategy is to copy everything onto an 
external USB HD and then put that somewhere. I'm not sure that all this 
turning the drive on and off won't just wear it out faster.

PS. I've yet to find a consumer RAID controller which actually works 
properly. They all seem to be hopelessly unreliable. And most of them 
are software RAID anyway; the controller is a normal IDE or SATA 
controller, and the Windows driver does all the actual RAID functions in 
software. It seems that only the £££ server-grade controllers actually 
do the job properly.

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