Hi,

I'm now looking for a single 4-5 bay hardware RAID box. Hardware RAID because I don't want to tax the computer's CPU. Seems if I want data redundancy, RAID 1 is the easiest to recover data from. 

I rather have one 4-bay tower than two 2-bay boxes. But, Will I have the option to create two sets of RAID 1 setups, with those 4-5 bay RAID boxen? For example, in a 4-bay box, I want disk 1 mirrored with disk 2 for RAID 1 set #1, and disks 3 and 4 mirrored for RAID 1 set #2.

A lot of those 5-bay options seem primarily intended for RAID 5, but also supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3, JBOD, etc. For RAID 1, would the only option be to have the same disk mirrored to all four other disks? If so, that's way excessive and kinda braindead for my simple 1-to-1 RAID purpose. 

Are individual disks in RAID 1 hotswappable, or would I have to break the RAID first? 

If I put in a disk with data and a fresh disk, I hope the RAID hardware would be intelligent enough to automatically mirror the data disk to the blank one, or at the very least, ask me what to do. Is this the case, or would the RAID hardware require refilling both disks from scratch in a mirrored setup?

Is it ok to mix disks of same capacity from different manufacturers, say a Maxtor 250GB 16MB and a Hitachi 250GB 8MB? 

Any recommendation for 4-5 bay hardware RAID boxes, with Firewire 800/400/optional USB2, and ideally disk tray options that can accept 3.5" SATA or ATA disks, or even 2.5" disks?

One of those product pages linked below mentions a RS232 port that can be used by Linux/Windows for accessing a HTTP proxied RAID Manager interfacce. If I have the Keyspan USB-serial adapter, would I be able to use the HTTP interface on the Mac too?

Please help.

I didn't find the right solution from the Internet.

References

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=417557

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Thanks