If I recall correctly Fedora in the 2003 - 2006 era included an option to set up raid as part of the standard installer. Around the same time frame gnomes disk

If I recall correctly Fedora in the 2003 - 2006 era included an option to set up raid as part of the standard installer. Around the same time frame gnomes disk tool supported actually doing operations like replacing a disk in that array. Even the incantation to do it manually isn't that magic. I'm guessing you could read the manual for the options to mdadm --create in minuted rather than days. If you want to be really fancy zpool create mirror foo mirror bar.