[gentoo-user] {OT} Why RAID1?

[Grant]

I'm about to buy a couple Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drives and I was
planning on setting them up in a RAID0 array.  Everyone seems to love
RAID1 though, and I'm a little confused as to why.  Don't daily
backups secure 99% of the data that RAID1 does?  They even protect in
the event of theft or fire which RAID1 doesn't.

If one hard drive dies in a RAID1 array, does the system keep running?
 If so, that's good, but there are so many other components that could
die.  In 15 years I've lost the power supply, video card, modem,
motherboard, and CPU, but never a hard drive.  With all these
potential points of failure, how much greater system reliability do
mirrored hard drives really offer?

- Grant