I have a raid5 running and now also a raid1 that I set up yesterday. Since raid5 calculates parity it should be able to catch silent data corruption on one disk. However for raid1 the disks are just mirrors. The more I think about it I figure that raid1 is actually quite risky. Sure it will save me from a disk failure but i might not be as good when it comes to protecting the data on disk (who is actually more important for me).

1. How does Linux software raid actually store raid1 type data on disk?
2. How does it know what spindle is giving corrupt data (if the disk(subsystem) is not reporting any errors)

If raid1 really is not giving me data protection but rather disk protection is there some tricks I can do with mdadm to create a two disk "raid5 like" setup? e.g. loose capacity but still keep redundancy also for data!?