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I have an external hard drive (Lacie big disc extreme). The power supply melted and my warranty is void. I need the data on this disc but do not want to fork over the $50 to replace the power supply right now.

I have opened the case and found two 500GB drives. I can only assume they are in RAID 0.

Can I safely access these drives by plugging them directly into my desktop PC?
Should I replicate the RAID 0 on my desktop?

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RAID 0 is data stripped across both drives.

You cannot access only one of the drives. Both are needed for the array

It is likely that the unit was doing hardware RAID 0 if it is doing RAID 0. As such, you cannot then take both drives and stick them into your computer and access the array.

Replacing the power supply is likely your only solution if the array is RAID 0.

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  • I agree. Get the power specs from the old powersupply and head to radio shack with the disk to match up the power connector, or just order one from ebay
    – Matt Simmons
    Jun 17, 2009 at 19:07
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Don't despair! You're not totally stuffed! THERE ARE RECOVERY OPTIONS! If only the PSU is dead, there is a piece of software I've used called Zero Assumption Recovery (and it's not the only software that can do this, but its the one I've got experience with).

I've done this on a WD 2TB MyBook drive (2x 1TB):

1) Plug the drives into your PC (in any manner, internal, SATA, eSATA, USB caddy, whatever)

2) Make sure that you don't let Windows initialise, format, or prepare the disks (just cancel whatever wizards pop up)

3) Run Zero Assumption Recovery - http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ - and tell it you want to repair a RAID volume (You might need to pay for it)

4) It will do a byte-level inspection of your two disks to re-create the RAID. If it finds a file system, you can go ahead and run your recovery :)

A better tutorial can be found here: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/raid-recovery-tutorial.htm

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You need both drives in RAID 0 because its a stripe set. The data is written across both drives.

Its basically like ripping a phone book in half... only half a phone book would still be partially readable.

Honestly, for $50... I'd replace the power supply on it. Its probably the cheapest solution in the end (time vs money).

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Some versions of the Lacie big disc extreme use JBOD, and not raid0.

Depends on the number of interfaces, apparently.

Triple interface = raid0, USB2 only = JBOD

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