Please advice a mirroring solution.

[konstantin.neo]

Hi.
I recently lost a 1.5TB seagate barracuda to death clicking noise so I am decided to be a bit more serious towards my data and plan on having some backup, RAID 1 looks nice, with only 2 drives for mirroring. I intend to use RAID 1 only for the storage and another drive for the OS.
My motherboard has raid controller but this will be the first time I will use it. I've checked the web but there are still some unclear bits about it that I don't understand.
If one of the RAID 1 drives fails, what do I do? Just swap out the failed drive for a new one and it will be mirrored to the new one?

Should I go RAID 1 at all or there is some other type of solution for duplicating drives, maybe in windows? I cannot do it manually because I don't trust my own memory/laziness to backup.

Thanks.
P.S.
I use a EVGA 650i Ultra with Nforce motherboard.

[falther]

Those on board Raid controllers I found need to be initialised and would not work
without that.

The simpler method (which I use) is to have a seperate raid electronic working the
way you mention:

Its either an electronic pcb (DC-5220 from DawiControl) to be connected with one
single SATA cable - which then handles both raid 1 HDD - the source and the clone,

or its an external case for 2 HDD which works the same way - connected with one
eSATA cable from PC. (I use this version as its safer with seperate power supply).

In both versions you could use an existing hdd with your system and data as source
and insert a new empty hdd (same size or bigger) as clone (mirror). Pressing a
button on the pcb or on the case initialises the electronic to accept the new drives.
After restart it immediately starts to copy the complete data from source to clone
- without disturbing the usability of the system.

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