Couple of questions: 
1. Why ext3fs? Why not  Raiserfs (which is a journaling fs)?
2. Why bother with RAID1 for your system partitions? If you have a single user system, who cares about the system partition; you're upgrading all the time anyway. It's your documents an photos that are irreplaceable. On the other hand, if you run a criticle server, maybe you can justify RAID... but then you have to keep an eye on the logs all the time.
Which is it?

 What does your /etc/fstab file look like for a RAID?  Does the linux installation know how to create it, or does the user have to tinker with /etc/fstab?

Is your RAID transparent, as a file system, when you boot to a Live-CD?   Can you fix stuff easily by booting to a live CD if you have to?

 What do you put into the grub setup to cause RAID support to be loaded, if your kernel doesn't have RAID compiled in?

 skua