... and the day job desktop disk blowed up ...

Well, the OS drive did anyway. The home directory data is happily living on the RAID unit. Curiously, we just got our BackupPC based backup unit set up, and it was backing this unit up … Oh well. No great loss, apart from setup time for the new OS drive(s). Will do a software RAID 1 this time. And likely make it an SSD pair.