A while back one of the servers I help out with that a buddy of mine 
owns had a catastrophic hard drive failure.  It wasn't a HUGE deal 
because we were slowly migrating off to a new server, but there still 
was some data loss.

The newer server we're migrating to which I am more active in managing 
does not currently have redundant drives.  I do a lot of off-site 
backup of important data, but I'm still very nervous about this 
situation and trying to push the owner to spend some money on more 
hardware.  There isn't a hardware RAID controller so I am suggesting 
to the owner of the server to purchase a couple more disks so I can 
setup a software RAID solution as I've been reading up on here:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

Questions:

1.) Does anyone have experiences they can share with setting up a s/w 
RAID on an existing system?  (Server is a Dell PowerEdge 1750 running 
Debian sid with 2.4.32 - I build the kernel myself - it is currently 
co-located which might make remote setup interesting)

2.) We can have a maximum of 3 drives on the SCSI controller.  I am 
pushing to get two more drives matching the current drive.  I was 
going to use one as a scratch space / archive area and then use the 
other to setup a software RAID.  Sound ok or something better?

3.) RAID-1 seems to be the right solution for this kind of setup (only 
2 disks, exact same size)

Any other suggestions / war stories are most welcome.

Thanks,

Josh