I think I get the RAID 1 thing working even on different brand of harddisk

One thing I like about my new Cacalry Dual-Bay Dock is the ability of doing RAID 1.  That way, I will always have 2 copies of the same file, and whenever there's anything wrong with one drive, I will always have the second drive working.  And to resume to RAID, all I need to do it put a new same size drive in, and everything will work OK afterward.

However, I was puzzled by how I can prepare a drive to be used as the backup drive on RAID 1.  In fact, I tried that 2 days ago and it failed.  Turns out I was just not doing the right thing.

So here's the set up: I already have a 1Tb harddisk running properly.  It's the Z drive on my networked machine.  So I yanked that 1Tb drive from the hard disk enclosure and put it in the Cacalry Dual-Bay.  The system instantly recognize it as the Z drive.  So actually, all is well.

But when I put in a second drive (not freshly clean, but I wipe out the partition), I DID NOT see the RAID 1 copying kicking in.  I was puzzled.

Turns out I have to create the same partition BUT NOT initialized on the backup drive.  Once I did that, the Cacarly recognize it, and as far as I know, it is doing RAID 1 copying now.  Notice that both disks are 1Tb, but in different brand name.

If the copying goes well, then I will buy another Cacalry Dual-Bay Dock and with 2 2Tb disk.  I can always find ways to use up all the spaces.