Q:

How to remove a drive from a non-standard 2-drive RAID 5 array?

There is some information available on shape changes in RAID arrays but I'm  a little nervous and would like confirmation: 
Problem: I have 2 500GB drive as software raid 5 (mdadm). I would like to free one of the two drives since RAID-redundancy is for wimps... Can I just 
mdadm --grow --array-size=1 
followed by a 
mdadm --grow --raid-disks 1?
This seems too simple. How would I specify which drive gets freed? Part of the reason for this maneuver is that I don't have additional space to run a backup. 
Edit: As it is, this is a non-std RAID5 implementation (see comments by Dave M or gman). However, please don't chastise me for recklessness. I am simply interested in the least risky method of doing this drive removal. Let's assume I have taken care of the backup issue but I'm not going to use it to rebuild from backup.

$ sudo mdadm --detail --test /dev/md1 
/dev/md1:
        Version : 00.90
  Creation Time : Sat Sep  1 18:08:21 2007
     Raid Level : raid5
     Array Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 1
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Update Time : Mon Nov 28 11:32:13 2011
      State : clean

Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0
     Layout : left-symmetric
 Chunk Size : 64K

       UUID : XXX (local to host XXX)
     Events : 0.29336

Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
   0       8       33        0      active sync   /dev/sdc1
   1       8       17        1      active sync   /dev/sdb1

A:

With mdadm, a 2 drive RAID 5 is binary identical to a RAID1, not RAID 0, and there's no magical invisible device. You can tell because the array is the same 
size as each of the two components, not their sum:
Array Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB)
Used Dev Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB)

You can confirm that by doing:
 dd if=/dev/sdb1 bs=512 count=1024 of=/tmp/b1
 dd if=/dev/sdc1 bs=512 count=1024 of=/tmp/c1

 md5sum /tmp/b1
 md5sum /tmp/c1

The md5 is the same for each because the drives are redundant. Since this is the same as RAID, after stopping it we can either create a RAID1 on the same devices and have the same data:
mdadm -C /dev/md1  --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

Or do a RAID1 with just one device, freeing up the other:
mdadm -C /dev/md1  --level=1 --raid-devices=1 --force /dev/sdb1

Then clear the superblock on the removed one:
mdadm /dev/sdc1 --zero-superblock

Because it's a mdadm super block version 0.90, each drive should be usable on its own as well. Since 1.1 and 1.2 put the meta data near the beginning on the array it won't work for those versions.

