Little things mean a lot.
If you "joined" the drives, then the two drives acted as one. You get a bigger drive, but any failure of one loses both, most of the time.
If you mirror, most likely, depending on the interface, the disks should, as Maxtor stated, be able to be removed and the working drive information be retrieved by poping into a PC. The two disk should just act like "cloned" drive with data and FAT on both.
Alas, it all depends on the interface and how the information was written on the mirror.
RAID is nice, but if they fail, the setting can determine what you can get off the disks. If one disk goes, the RAID may go with it, depending on how the information is written. With fancy systems you should be able to identify the "bad" disk via software or a "light". You swap the disk and the other RAID disks copy the needed information to the new disk.
Companies do not want to talk about failure of their drives. So they may not say what happend in case of failure. Most large RAID system have removeable compartments/disks. They are built for failures. These are sealed units and the price reflects that.
As Maxtor states and I personally recommend, these are "backup" drives. Always have duplicates of important information.
I have three backups, two Maxtor units and a NAS.
