RAID 1 Mirror performance vs. Time Machine

[.macstiled]

Looking to hear any real-world performance experience on a RAID 1 Mirror external hard drive solution. Considering this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/MirrorRAID/

Will the mirroring be transparent to my MBP, and be handled by the enclosure, or is this type of setup going to be slower than using two separate external drives and using Time Machine to do backups? My concern with Time Machine is that I don't leave my MBP on when not in use, and don't want it to steal any bandwidth away while I'm working. But having two separate external drives does give me more options down the road. What do you think?

 

[pprior]

Looking to hear any real-world performance experience on a RAID 1 Mirror external hard drive solution. Considering this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/MirrorRAID/

Will the mirroring be transparent to my MBP, and be handled by the enclosure, or is this type of setup going to be slower than using two separate external drives and using Time Machine to do backups? My concern with Time Machine is that I don't leave my MBP on when not in use, and don't want it to steal any bandwidth away while I'm working. But having two separate external drives does give me more options down the road. What do you think?

Yes mirroring is transparent to the MBP
No will not be (perceptably) slower than 2 external drives, but time machine backup is entirely different animal.
You can always partition and use part of it for time machine if you wish. Personally I really like time machine and think it's the best part of Leopard - but I'm a lot less disciplined than I should be when it comes to backups, despite having invested a lot of money in hardware to make sure I do it.