Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I look after a couple of server in my current job that have hardware RAID (Dell) but they were set up by my predeces

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I look after a couple of server in my current job that have hardware RAID (Dell) but they were set up by my predecessors and they’ve never given any trouble since I started working there (touch wood). I have also not had any problems with Linux Software RAID, e.g., I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could move the RAID 1 disks from my previous home server (a repurposed Dell workstation) to the Proliant microserver and my Debian OS had no problem recognising them. The consensus seems to be that RAID isn’t particularly useful for a home server. Backup would be more useful as I would be more likely to accidentally delete or over-write a file than for a disk to fail catastrophically) so I think I might use the second disk, similar to how you use yours. I would also be better served by using ZFS; its de-duplication would also be useful – so I’m going to try it as an experiment.