So it's important to characterize what you're trying to do before jumping to wild conclusions about what is "stupid." Stupid for a server room might be smart for a home recording setup. And far too often, i've watched supposedly professional sysadmins screw up their fancy RAID setups and lose everybody's data (they also forgot to check that the backups were actually valid) -- something that probably woulnd't have happened nearly as often if they'd have just gotten a single SATA disk and hooked it up without RAID, perhaps even on a standard "consumer" computer instead of their special overpriced "server" equipment (don't even start me on when <large-comp-co-killed-by-linux-and-now-acquired> would force their open source projects to use their crap "server" equipment that performed worse and were less reliable than some snot-nose gamer kid's rig.)
Anyways, enough talk, some numbers:
RAID type sequential read random read sequential write random write
Ordinary disk 82 34 67 56
RAID0 155 80 97 80
RAID1 80 35 72 55
RAID10,n2 79 56 69 48
RAID10,f2 150 79 70 55
You'll note that RAID-1 performs about the same as an ordinary disk. In some cases of reading, RAID-1 can perform better than ordinary disks.
Isn't that a better use of potentially limited cash and space resources?
Niels