RAID1 setup question. please help!

i previously experienced data loss because i setup two 1.5TB drives as RAID0 and didn't have any backup... I don't want to make this mistake again!

So I purchased two 3TB drives to replace the two 1.5TB's that failed, and I plan to setup RAID1 in my OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro dual enclosure (connected via USB).

When I plug it in, disk utility shows 1 entry in the left hand pane titled
"6 TB Ext Hard Disk Media"
and there are no indented volumes under this!

all the instructions I see online for setting up RAID1 would require there to be two separate 3TB drives, not one 6TB one.

I assume I need to partition the drive into two 3TB sections.. but if i do this, will it be smart enough to make each 3TB physical internal drive a separate partition? that way if i have failure in drive A, i can swap it with a new one while drive B is working fine since the drives were segregated in the RAID1 mirror setup?

any help is greatly appreciated. thanks in advance!

P.S. I started the erase process (with 'Zero Out Data’ option selected) since this takes awhile and i read online you should do this with new drives before setting up RAID to ensure no errors

 

wow did not realize I had to set a switch in the enclosure... thank you for your quick response! I'm going to cancel the erase now so i can set it to RAID1 and then restart the process.

thank you thank you!!

 

dangit, just took it all apart, but there is no switch inside ;( or jumpers to remove/add

my enclosure is ~5 or 6 years old so i'm guessing my model does not support RAID....

do I have any other options?

thanks

 

i looked up the manual and RAID is only available in the model with FW/USB/eSata... the one i have is just USB/FW.

i'm thinking about getting a cheap dual enclosure but all of them are $100 or more!! yikes..

i did find this for under $100 used, and it has 4 HD slots so there is room to grow... and it supports RAID:
http://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-3-...8530&sr=1-7&keywords=hard+drive+enclosure+3.5

only downside is that it is usb 2.0 so i'll be limiting myself longterm, although my iMac only supports usb2.0 at the moment, so it shouldn't be an issue for me now.

any thoughts on this option? i don't have 400-600 to drop on a drobo ;( so i'd either get the above linked option, or just a plain dual enclosure that supports raid (for hopefully cheaper than the above option).