Raid 1

Hi everyone. My first new built hasn't been completed as yet. I intend to buy myself 4 hard drives (3 x 1tb + 1 x 500gb & 1 SSD). I love photography so I intend to have one drive just for my photos, the smaller drive for music (i'm new to downloading music) but my main hard drive I would like it to be in a Raid 1 configuration should, heaven forfid, one of my drives fail. As they will be completely new drives, do i have to format the drives before I make a start on configuring them to Raid 1 or can I do that after? Incidentally I've never built a computer before let alone dabbled in Raid but the replace one drive & still retain your precious info does appeal to me. I hope to do a hardware Raid configuration instead of a Software one. I feel it will be more challenging. Thanks for reading.