2 drive RAID NAS - good idea? Pointless?

Seems like a pretty ideal soluton for a household of two laptops.

Pros:

Raid 1 redundancy
Low power draw
Always on
USB printer server
Multimedia streaming (some support UnPnP, itunes etc)

Cons:

Cost
Slow data transfer


Must admit I am tempted, but is there a better solution?

Depends what you want to use them for I guess. I had a couple at work as emergency back up devices and for server transfers etc. From recollection they were badly slow for large backups and reverted to USB2 to transfer rather than the NIC.

Had very bad experiences with USB print servers in the past btw, some printers just don't like them (mostly those that like to communicate back to the host PC).

Netgear and Linksys both do a couple of models, the linksys slug (NSLU2) has an extremely active following with some really nice new firmwares (for geeks) - http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

i have a few slugs at home and i run them in a raid 1 config, i can stream music and films over my network and havent encounterd a problem to date

so for my money i recon there top notch