I recently got a 14TB re-certified HDD from ServerPartDeals

I planned to set it up to mirror my current 6 year old 2TB HDD, and use the remaining space for easy to replace data like steam games.

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I set this up using Windows 10 Pro's Disk Management "Mirror volume"

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A day or so after setting this up, Disk Management said there was a "Redundancy failure", and reactivating the mirror did not work. So I had to start over. And then today it did it again. It also said "Drive errors"

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CrystalDiskInfo says theres no issues, and no reallocated sectors

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So this time I set it up without the mirror. Is it possible that the mirror was causing the errors? Or should I go ahead and return the drive?

Like if I have a 10TB and 2TB drive, can I create a 2TB raid1 partition for important data and a 8TB partition for data that does not need to be backed up (Such as steam games and other easy to recovery things)

I tried to look it up myself and found things saying drives of different sizes can be raid1 together, and that the raid will be the size of the smallest drive, but I can't figure out if the remaining space can still be used for things

I ordered a drive from serverpartdeals and was wondering if theres anything I should do beyond plugging the drive in to test it

Should I do a full format to check for bad sectors? Or is that bad and or a waste of time?

CystalDiskInfo wouldn't help I assume because the SMART is wiped right?

Any tips or advice is appreciated