Dao
No longer a newbie, moving up!
I have seen many degraded arrays fail during a rebuild and then people cry to me they've lost their backup, to which the reply is always that they never actually had a backup.
And that is why they invent Hot Spares and RAID 6 so that the RAID system can rebuild as soon as one drive fails (for hot spare) and RAID 6 (or RAIDZ2 in ZFS) so that data is still good even 2 drives fail at the same time.
No RAID in any configuration replaces the need for backup. If you consider storage in terms of a service, you need to think in terms of Availability (RAID) versus Recoverability (Backups). Two distinct "problems" that are addressed in different ways. I am with Garbz, I've seen hundreds of ways a RAID (of all sorts of configurations) fails to protect data. (Interestingly... a bunch are user mistakes)
If on a budget, I'd put a priority on backups (recoverability) over RAID (availability). A home computer/data rarely needs constant availability but recoverability is always important. (a user can live for days without access to the data but wants their wedding photos recovered).
The question is.... how much is your data worth to you?
hahahah I think you may miss my earlier post.