Distractions: Raspberry Pi RAID array

I largely followed these very helpful instructions:
http://www.davidhunt.ie/raid-pi-raspberry-pi-as-a-raid-file-server/

also useful:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm

ingredients

2 1-TB western digital drives

USB hub with power supply for these

Edit: make sure it has enough power to power the drives! My initial one (pictured below) did not and I suspect it was drawing power from the pi causing it to crash

raspberry pi

USB power supply for this (separate from above)

8 GB sandisk microSD card

for use in raspberry pi
microSD card reader

cables to connect all

Steps:

download and install raspbian wheezy on in the microSD card, using the microSD card reader attached to your PC

recommend using the torrent to download, it was very fast once it got going

put the microSD card in the pi, attach a keyboard, monitor and ethernet cable attached to your router. plug in the power to the pi

should see the linux boot sequence on your monitor

configure the raspberry pi - here are the options I used:

boot to command line
change password of default user (username = pi)
advanced option: make sure SSH is enabled

reboot the pi, log in to confirm everything seems to be in order
(at this point I switched to using my laptop / ssh instead of the keyboard attached to the pi. I disconnected the monitor)
connect drives to USB hub, connect hub to pi
I mounted each of the drives to make sure they were working, and copied the readme pdf off of one out of curiosity / to actual test a disk op
(I partitioned and formatted each of the disks at this step, but realized later this was not necessary)
became super user: sudo su
install the tool to create / manage the RAID array:

apt-get instal mdadm

create the array:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
(note the double dashes for the options - the linked blog above only used single dashes. Some man pages only use 1 dash, that's what I tried initially and it did not recognize the options)

check the array:

cat /proc/mdstat

partition the array

fdisk /dev/md0

format the array

mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0p1

mount & test the array

mkdir temp
mount /dev/md0p1 temp
echo hello RAID > temp/test
cat temp/test

unmount the array

umount temp

declare victory, go home

I should point out the contents of /proc/mdstat initially indicated that the initial sync would take ~16 hours, but that with the array mounted, that slowed down to almost 4 days! Based on reading this:

http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=40557.0

I unmounted the array, and then watched the sync speed climb up back to where it was before.

After the sync finishes I'll start copying files onto it...