I see that nongo might be a student of disaster planning because he asked,

What could possibly be worse than this???????

Well ... the first bad thing after one drive of the RAID array failed was finding out how
difficult it would be to get a replacement drive of the same size (40GBy).

The next bad thing was a phone call that I got while researching HDD availability. 
But that phone call, although bad news, was also the solution ... not related to the
HDD failure ... just some real world ... real life ... non technical stuff. 

More on that ... later ...

--
Martin