System Recovery Console (hidden partition on HD).

I am building a new system using Windows 7 x64 Professional. Instead of RAID1, I was thinking of relying on the Win 7 System Recovery Console to regularly make a System Image of C: to an external USB HD in case of failure of Cr of serious Windows corruption.
How well does System Image recovery work generally?

Are there issues I should watch out for, e.g., when booting into the System Recovery Console to do a System Image recovery, what about problems seeing the System Image on the external HD?

Should I stick to USB 2 for the external HD?

Thanks CMA

Creating a system image on external USB HD is not as secure as a RAID system if everything you do every day is critical; the reason being that it is only as good as the last time you made the back-up. But then again it does have an advantage in that if a virus infects a RAID system then both drives are infected whereas a disconnected or powered off external drive would not.

For most users who are willing to commit to a regular back-up schedule, such as once a week, the system image is great for emergency recovery (at most you loose 7 days work with a weekly schedule).

Link to Microsoft System Image and Back-up information

Personally I simply create a system image after a fresh install and then I use SyncToy, weekly to transfer my data (or you could use System back-up or other back-up utilities if you want it more secure and compressed). I have an external HD as big as my internal so I can afford to simply sync the files uncompressed and that way if I need to restore a document I don't need a recovery program to get it.

Thanks for the answer. I'm not concerned about backups per se. I do that every night. My only concern is loss of time if the C: goes bad or if Windows gets severely corrupted.
Assuming I have a large enough external USB HD and that I do regular System Image backups to the external HD, my only concern was the reliability of restoring the System Image to the original HD (or new HD, if necessary).
Are there issues that make this methode of restoring a System Image tricky, like the one I mentioned where the System Recovery Console cannot recognize the external HD because the necessary USB drivers are not loaded?

Unless you have some very unusual USB drive they are plug-and-play.

See restore tutorial HERE.

Thanks for the excellent tutorial. It looks reasonably good. I suppose the one glitch can be seen in the dialog that says "If you are unable to select an option above, then installing the drivers for the disks to which you are restoring might solve the problem.
My C: drive on the new system will be SSD. I assume I will be able to make an System Image from the SSD. The only question is if the System Image can be restored from an external HD back onto a (good) SSD.

Yes it can be restored back to a SSD.

TrainableMan:
Thanks for your expert assistance. I feel confident enough to get my new system without RAID (which has problems of its own.)