[holamateo]

Hello,

I'm trying to build a raid 1 as redundant backup for my Macbook Pro using the Icy Dock 2-bay Firewire enclosure (model MB662USEB-2S) and 2 brand new 2TB Seagate 3.5" drives. I'm fairly tech savvy, understand troubleshooting, read through the documentation, did lots of Googling, but I'm running up against a wall. Here are the details:

IcyDock site says this model is compatible with my Mac and with drives up to 3TB. This enclosure is reviewed at Macworld, with other mac users, and OWC even sells them. So this tells me they "should" work with Macs. I'm running OSX 10.5.8 and on a 2007 Macbook Pro (anything above OSX 9.0 is compatible).

I set the dial on rear to raid1 (as opposed to JBOD or raid0) before cabling up an powering on. After it's powered up, the disk utility recognizes a single unformatted raid volume with the Cremax brand (IcyDock's parent company I think) rather than two Seagate volumes. From what I understand you need two volumes to build a raid so the "create" button remains un-selectable. Of course nothing mounts and shows up in the Finder.

Previous to getting the Seagate drives, I tried two brand new WD 2TB Caviar Green drives in the IcyDock (same exact problem). After swapping the WD's out for the equivalent Seagates, the sales guy at my local retailer plugged the raid into his PC via USB2.0 to test it out and two volumes showed up fine - so this tells me everything "should" be working fine, at least on the PC.

The shop is PC only so they can't offer any insight to my particular problem. At home I've tried both fw800 ports and two different fw800 and usb2.0 cables to rule out a cable or port problem. I've read through all "documentation" on the IcyDock site (very sparse) which was no help. As a last resort I even took the drives out, and one at time formatted them as MacOS Extended Journaled in a regular hard drive enclosure, and then put them both back in the IcyDock. No luck. This shop will charge me 15% restocking fee so I want to rule out user error before attempting to return it all and go buy a Lacie at the Apple Store (something I probably should have done in the first place). Thanks for any help!

[reader50]

If your enclosure has a RAID switch on the back, then it's doing the RAID internally for you. Use Disk Utility to format the resulting volume.

Or, you could use OS X software RAID. Set the switch on back to present bare drives. Disk Utility will see two drives, and you create the RAID using DU's controls.

From your description, you're trying to do it both ways. Setting the switch to RAID 1 on the enclosure so the enclosure handles it internally, then expecting to do it again in OS X software. Choose which way you want to implement the RAID, and do it only that way.

[holamateo]

Hi Reader50, thanks, this was helpful getting my head around how external raid hardware works and how the OS sees it. Unlike other some raid enclosures which require you to set up with raid disk utility, with the Icy Dock you set the switch to raid 1, pop in two drives, and format the single volume. I think what was hanging me up was the fact that with an external hardware raid, the Mac disk utility does not know it has a raid plugged in and it treats it like a single drive. For some reason I assumed (hoped) the Mac would at least be aware there are two drives in the raid, but I can understand that since the external raid handles the redundancy there technically is no need for the OS to manage any of it.

For peace of mind, it would still be cool if you could check status of each drive in the raid, through the OS, rather than relying on little LED's and color codes on the front of the raid. I suppose this would be one advantage of a software raid, or possibly a raid card. Anyhow, thanks for your help.