2-HDD External Enclosure

[eurobass]

I've recently purchased an external hard drive enclosure. This unit holds two 1TB SATA hard drives which I inserted today.

I had the idea of using 1 hard drive for storage and the other hard drive copy the storage drive every night, so there are always 2 copies of the same information (I'm petrified of HDD failure).

This enclosure has 1 USB2 cable that connects into my computer.

My computer will only recognize this combination of drives as 1-2TB HDD.

My overall goal is for my computer read read each drive separately.

I know I can create two equal partitions, but then would I be able to read each drive separately?

Any help with this issue would be great!

Thanks!

 

[sickmacdoc]

If you were to provide some specifics as to what brand and model the enclosure is we could probably provide some specific help on it as there are SO many variations of options on double drive enclosures.

For instance yours apparently came configured as a "concatenated" drive set which reports a single drive (which consists of any individual disks made into one large logical disk) to the system, where what you are looking for is the ability to operate your enclosure in what is known as a "JBOD" mode- which is an acronym for "Just a Bunch Of Disks" (no, really!) in which the system would see the two individual drives independently.

Not all enclosures offer the ability to configure the way it treats drives within, so check your documentation thoroughly to see if the JBOD term is mentioned or contact the manufacturer if the documentation or online support section do not address this.

And no, BTW- partitioning a single logical volume made up of two drives would not actually allow the system to see them individually although it would seem like it at first glance since two icons would appear on the desktop. The system itself would still see it as one 2Tb drive so a failure of either drive would be catastrophic. If they were in JBOD mode, a failure of one drive would only result in the data being lost on that particular drive while the other one would remain unaffected.