[AstralWanderer]

Fyron said:
Relying on the user making manual backups is not a sound strategy. There will be lapses, and Murphy's Law guarantees that any problems will occur during those lapses.

As I noted above, you can automate backups, and they are very much necessary whether mirroring or not.

Fyron said:
With sound partitioning strategies, malware infections are trivial to clear out....Even with a RAID, formatting the Windows partition and reinstalling to fix deep malware infection isn't that big of a deal.

I disagree. Partitioning can make restoring from a backup easier (providing the option of restoring the Windows partition only to recover from registry corruption without affecting the applications installed) but it most certainly does not make a Windows reinstall easy! Most applications store data in the Windows Registry which will be lost in such an event, meaning that many will need to be reinstalled and reconfigured. The time taken for this can greatly outweigh that of installing and configuring Windows itself (and could take days in the case of a well-developed setup with dozens of applications).

Fyron said:
RAID 0 is never an option. Don't even consider it.

Depends on the situation. I use it and for me the performance benefits outweigh the increased likelihood of disk failure (which a regular image backup takes care of). Indeed, the only situations where mirroring could pose an advantage are those where the data is critical enough to merit using higher RAID levels anyway.