Raiding Thunderbolt Drives - Need help

[Peter Cote]

I have two Western Digital 6 TB Thunderbolt Drives. Basically each enclosure has two 3 TB drives to make a 6 TB striped raid. Is there a way for each of those raids to mirror one another? I want to edit on one drive and always have an updated backup. Then occasionally update an offsite backup. I was using disk utility to create the raid and it seems it can only create a mirrored raid where a 3 TB drive is mirrored on the additional 3 drives.

How can I make each 6 TB Raid mirror each other in a separate raid?

[Brian Merlen]

there should be a way to get them stipped together... are you on mac or pc for the OS? (probably mac but i figured i should ask since supposedly some pcs are shipping with thunderbolt now)

perhaps some setting in disc utility? (i never stipped on a mac before but i assume its in there)

[Sam Edwards]

I would not attempt to write everything to both drives all the time. You are more likely to need to undo a major mistake than to recover from a hardware failure. And you don't want to make the mistake on both drives at once.
If you're working on a mac I would use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to sync the drives every lunch break and nigh when I'm not working. It should be very fast considering they're thunderbolt raids. Assuming you can do anything twice as fast the second time you're only risking about two hours of redoing. If it's really fast you can add backups during your morning and afternoon breaks. But only do the sync when you you are sure you didn't mess something up.
There's also Time Machine, if you're not already using it for something else.
Cheers,
Sam

[Brian Iannone]

How can I make each 6 TB Raid mirror each other in a separate raid?

That would be a mirror of a striped array (RAID 0+1). In Disk Utility, you stripe both of the two hard drives in each enclosure together to create two separate arrays, then create a mirrored array of both of those.

Although personally, I wouldn't use RAID 1. Instead, I'd just do regular backups from one 6TB array to the other once or twice a day. When using RAID 1, if a file becomes corrupt, it will immediately be transferred to the second array. (Which would be bad.)

[Brian Merlen]

Also you should consider getting drives to keep off site at a secondary location or use a cloud (if it doesn't take 100 years to upload). My friend just lost a ton of data in a fire, and after that I am going to start keeping my own personal stuff in two locations... People often don't envision a situation like that until its too late...