We have two mirrored SATA drives. If a drive fails, the other one has all the information needed. We also have a 3rd SATA drive sitting in the 3rd bay of the server. I couldn't connect it because I only had two SATA connections. I could have connected it via IDE and gone with a better RAID, but what we have is sufficient. One drive dies, the other keeps working. The spare is used to replace the dead drive and we copy all information over to the new drive. They trash the bad drive and I send'em a new one to put into the spare slot. A drive failure wouldn't bring us down. A SATA controller, yes, but it damn sure wouldn't take 6 days.
Oh, and I still have my account at Dreamhost and Go Daddy. Our server fails, we do a temp move back to the old host until the problem is resolved.