Like the Drobo...this seems excessively overpriced compared to the Acer easystore h340 WHS, or the HP equivalent, the Acer at least of which comes with 1TB of storage out of the box, plus 2GB of DDR2 for significantly less.

...Synology.

Get yourself the immensely more customisable, versatile, and technically more advanced Cube Station (or if you want to go really crazy then then DS409+), and you won't be disappointed. The ajax web interface is awesome, and they keep adding features, even retrospectively. You can also pick about in the shell and install optware, making it basically a very low power, low cost fully-fledged server.

Of course reads are faster in RAID1. The RAID algorithm can pick either disk to read from, whilst simultaneously moving the heads on the other drive to the next piece of data.

Almost as fun as spotting the typos in the Curry House/Chinese restaurant menus -- one of the best ones I saw was 'Mixed Girl' -- think they meant Mixed Grill :)

say a 409 maybe..