I bought myself a nice Dell 2300 server on ebay a few months ago. I has a RAID card and space for 6 hot swappable disks.

When I bought the server it had two 9Gb Quantum disks in it. At the time I couldn't afford new disks (the server only cost me $200 and the disks I wanted would have cost three times that amount). Because I didn't want to mess about with silly small partitions I decided to set the two disks up as a striped 18Gb drive.

Unfortunately yesterday I came to regret that decision...

One of the drives died without any warning, with lots of flashing lights and beeping from the server, all very dramatic. So I lost all 18Gb of disk instead of just losing one 9Gb drive.

Of course I have now discovered that I was not backing everything up that I thought I was. I have lost six months of so of photos and other bits and pieces.

I also lost 10Gb of MP3s, but I was working through re-ripping them anyway...

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can try to get the data back, other than taking it to a data recovery firm, my photos aren't that important to me...

I'm now about to buy myself 4 18Gb drives so that I can have a 60Gb RAID 5 array this time. I wish SCSI disks were a bit cheaper, I think my next server will have a IDE RAID array instead.