Its all down hill!!

[KDesignIT]

Ok, so here's the thing... I lock myself out of my truck (DUH!) so I had to jimmy it open.. the jimmy hit a gear on my window, so the window fell thru the door.. the college kicked us off campus for the Thanksgiving weekend and told us to take our valuables.. well instead of dragging my whole desktop computer tower, I just yanked the drives out of it.... well, I dropped one of them and it just happened to be the drive that I used solely as storage for my personal files and school files!! (Couldn't be the C drive where Windows and programs are ooohhh noooo...)  Anywho, I've sent the drive to OnTrack Data Recovery in Reston, VA.. hopefully they can salvage most of my data.. they better since its a $100 just for them to look at it and tell me what is recoverable, and between $700 to $2300 to get the data off of it, onto a DVD, and back to me.  So, I've learned my lesson and I'm going to buy two SATA 400GB drives.. I'm going to want to set them up into a RAID 1 (mirror) thing......  but here is my question of the day:   would a RAID software controller or RAID hardware controller be better???  This is my first time ever using RAID, so you'll have to bare with my idiocy..lol  Thanks!

[QBall15j]

Ouch, that sucks!!!
Data recovery isn't cheap, depending on the damaged caused by the drop some software tools may have been able to recover your data without having to send your drive out for repair.

If your looking to setup RAID, Windows XP Pro can handle it on the software side.  Hardware based SATA RAID controllers still aren't to cheap from what I've seen, unless your motherboard already supports it.  If your motherboard has has built-in RAID make sure it's SATA and not just IDE.

[KDesignIT]

Well the drive just kept clicking and clicking and clicking (that's never good!) and when the system tried to boot up, it would hang for about 5 or 8 mins during the drive detection, and Windows loading stalled and when I restarted, it said it had experienced a hard ware failure that prevented Windows from loading properly. So I took the drive out, and called OnTrack. Figured if it couldn't at least boot normally, then there was probably no chance of me recovering the data with software. When I did call OnTrack, they said to yank the power from it ASAP when I told them it was doing nothing but clicking, lol. My motherboard does have two small pink SATA connectors on it, but does that mean its also RAID capable? I remember receiving two floopy disk with the mobo, and I'm about 60% sure they were labeled RAID setup or something. So guessing it probably is SATA RAID capable given I use the floppies to get it started.

[KDesignIT]

I take that back, it doesn't have just two small pink SATA connectors, there are four now that I look at it.. lol