Raid 1 question

[fly2hip8]

I was just curious when you have raid 1 setup in a computer, which hard drive actually gets information pulled from it or is it both?

 

[apache_lives]

on cheap cards it writes to both (mirror) but only seems to read off one at a time (i had two 5.25'' bays with hdd lights, reading only made the top light up, writing both lit up with activity)

i believe the RAID1 "faster read speed" is false atleast for desktop raid cards...