I have some important data shared amoung 5 computers that I don't want to lose in any way, so I bought a Dell PowerEdge T430 server which came with the PERC H330 RAID controller and 3 drives (2 drives + 1 hot swap). I wanted to create a RAID 1 with my 3 1TB HDDs but sadly I realized that this controller allows RAID 1 with only 2 drives plus 1 hot spare drive. I searched on the Internet but I could not find any page that tells me more about it and how it works. The only thing I understood is that it works in standby and wakes up and starts to mirror once there is a drive failure and stops when you replace the bad drive. Does this also mean that I could use it as a normal drive once the mirroring is done? I can't find any crucial advantages about using this hot spare drive.
Anyway the RAID controller also allows me to create a RAID 5 using all of them, but I don't know if this is good beacuse it allows only 1 disk to fail.
What have I to do? Shall I use the RAID 1 plus 1 hot spare? If yes, for a better solution, which drive shall I use as the hot spare one?