Just got my OWC Merc Elite-AL Pro 800/400/U2 Dual HD Enclosure.

I just took delivery of this same enlosure on Thursday. I stuck two 500GB WD HDD in it, but I can't get either my MBP or my XP box to recognize thd drive. Is there something special I need to do? The two drives are brand new by the way. Any help on this is greatly appreciated

What do you mean by "not recognize"?

Any new drive has to be formatted first before they will show on the Desktop. Do you see the mechanisms listed when you open Disk Utility? Can you Erase or Partition them?

The drive does not show up under Disk Utility my MBP. So I'm at a loss as to how I can reformat these drives if my system is not even recognizing them at all.

I've tried switching the jumpers on the external chipset between Spanning, Striped and JBOD, and still a no go.

Anyone have any ideas?

OK, if your enclosure supports hardware RAID, then you need to consult the instructions or contact the manufacturer as to how the disks need to be formatted. In that case, the Mac doesn't 'see' the individual disks, it sees only the bridge card. Your problem is that the disk mechanisms are not formatted yet -- OWC formats them to HFS+ before assembling them when you buy a populated case, but its up to you to format them on an empty enclosure. You may be able to get it to work if you can format the drives in another case before installing them.

See OWC's page on RAID configuration - NOTE that this page says that their RAID utility is not compatible with Intel Macs.

FWIW this hard drive enclosure is massive overkill for the AEBS USB drive port. You don't need Firewire 400/800 for the AEBS and the speed of the base station on USB 2.0 is so dreadful there is no point to having a RAID 0 for speed. Doing RAID 1 for mirroring is a small added protection against failure of a disk, but does not help you in th case of accidental erasure or failure of the enclosure's power supply or bridge board.

A better choice might have been an NAS enclosure with its own Ethernet connection - speed would be much better, or a much less expensive USB enclosure and forget the RAID.

I appreciate the reply and the links. A friend of mine does have a USB to SATA adaptor, but I'm not sure if that will work with a Mac. I was thinking that I could use that USB to SATA adaptor and format the drives out of the enclosure to HFS+. If I could format to HFS+ on a windows box, I couls simply just hook it up to my XP box and format it that way, but I don't believe there is a way to do that unfortunately.

My intentions were, to use this external drive in RAID 1. I'm a new godfather/uncle and my sister and brother in law has put it on me to store all the Digial Pictures and Movies. So I was wanting the added benefit or Mirroring, just in case one of the drives take a dump on me. I don't have an AEBS.

Unfortunately I do not have a pre intel Mac, or know anyone that does. Gonna call OWC on monday to see if there is a Windows version of the utility, and maybe get an RMA if I'm unable to format the drives to HFS via USB --> SATA cable, and get it working.

*Edit, I see the original poster was the one talking about using it with AEBS, sorry.