External HD with Raid 1

Gonna need to buy a large external HD really soon to go with a notebook I intend to buy in the near future,.. I would like one with Raid support.

Found 2 which does what I want, but now I can't decide which one to go for....

Its either the:

Freecom DataTank 1TB 1xFirewire 400/1xFirewire 800/1xUSB 2.0, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache (Raid 0 or 1)

or

Maxtor Onetouch 3 1TB RAID 0/1 USB/FW/FW800 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache

Which one do you think is the better option to go for?

*Edited* Things that are important to me is reliability and ease of getting data back.

I know with the maxtor drive I need to send it in for repairs, but I don't know if that includes data recovery.

 

Well, I'll tell you, you won't see any performance increase with raid 1 over FW or USB. A single drive will max out the bandwidth.
Of course, you could go buy a fibre channel card and see some real speeds from an external enclosure :-D

I'd go with the maxtor though, and set it up in Raid1. I'm sure you would rather have a backup of 500 GB of data than risk trying to gain a bit of speed with raid 0 and have a drive die and loose 1 TB worth of data.

 

Yes, I do intend to have a Raid 1 setup. So I guess whats most important to me is the reliability.

Being an external HD, I don't expect it to be fast, I just like to know which of the 2 is the better option to go for.

 

I'm not a huge fan of Maxtor drives, but I've never heard of Freecom. It also doesn't say what brand drives it uses.

I'd probably go with Maxtor. And I can't believe how cheap those units are now.