Data Recovery Part II - the son of the return of the revenge of Data Recovery

Okay - quick update on the data recovery ongoing drama... I swapped out the PCB cards mounted on the two hard drives and found that I was able to access the data on the "broken" drive. That should mean that I can take an image of each of the two drives using the Runtime Data RAID Reconstructor software one at a time, then use the same software to stitch them back together into a single drive image. Simple, huh? There appears to be a very low failure rate for this, so I'm pretty confident (arrogance making a strong return to the fore) that we can get all of our data back!

What's amazing to me is that more than a few companies wanted to charge me over $2,000 minimum to do this! Again, I understand that these companies usually work with larger organizations that can afford $2,000 easily, and that they were giving estimates without being able to look at the drives or investigate the issue - but still... The services were starting at $2,000!

So, shopping around for drives, I have decided I need a little more space and am now looking at 750GB or 1TB drives... Samsung is making the top of the list right now, but I'd be happy to use another Western Digital if I can get it at a good price. The best WD I can find right now is $235 or so for 1TB at Bestbuy.com - decent, but still a little high for me right now (see "not made of money" comment in previous post). Samsung appear to have slightly quieter drives (though with 8 case fans on my rig, I'm not sure I'll notice the difference!) while WD seem to be a little faster access (though at less than 1 microsecond difference, I'm not sure a guy on speed-laced espresso would notice).

We'll see - in the meantime, I'm looking at taking the drive out of a removable hard drive I have (one of the WD myBook drives) and using that to hold one of the drive images for reassembly. I'll let you all know how that goes. I'll also take some pictures of the PCB transfer so you can see what I'm talking about...

for now, keeping with tradition, here's a video about computers: