u/matchingsweaters

Hey all!

I had a G-Raid Mini my first 3 years of college while in a film program. It stopped working about 10 years ago during my junior year. I wrote off those files as being gone.

Lately I've been doing a more comprehensive backup of all of my files. I'm a little older, a little wiser, and a little more hip to knowing about hard drives and what raid arrays are (barely). I got that drive out, plugged it in to see if it would power up. Found that the fan didn't start, and that it was blinking with a red light on one side. I figured it must be a power issue (fan not starting) or maybe one drive of the raid array was borked (now that I knew that arrays were comprised of two drives. again, older and just barely smarter).

I cracked open the metal enclosure that houses the array and pulled out two 500gb hard drives that make it up. One is recognized by computer but doesn't mount, the other one doesn't mount. Possibly a failed drive? I also only have a basic dock with two SATA ports(?) which I'm not sure has the possibility to recognize the drives as an array.

I ran the singular drive that is recognized through diskdrill and it seemed like the files were reasonably able to be recovered, maybe? It stemmed from high likelihood to low. But I've read since then that diskdrill maybe isn't the best program, and I wasn't sure how to set up datarecovery as an array. If I can even do that now that the other drive has failed.

I was curious, before I spent 50-100 bucks on software, is this the best approach to recovering this data? Should I send these drives out to someone to do this for me? Looking for feedback as someone who, admittedly has done about as much research that I can follow, also is ready to admit that I have a lot of glaring holes in my knowledge.

Thanks in advance! If this doesn't work out I'll still be okay as I wrote off the data about 10 years ago. I'll just be excited if I can pull a chunk off of these drives.

For what it's worth, I've since learned my lesson and now keep multiple back ups and two additional mirrored cold storage back ups (remember, older and wiser).