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I have a Fantom G-Force Mega Disk MDN 1000 dual drive hard drive enclosure with two 500 MB hard drives setup in RAID 1 mirroring mode. Unfortunately, the enclosure/controller has failed, for the third time, and I am having a hard time finding a replacement enclosure for my drives. Can someone tell me if it is possible for me to place these two drives into another enclosure by another brand and still access the data ... or if I am going to need to locate another one of these enclosures from Fantom (now discontinued, I'm sure because of problems like this.) Otherwise, any advice on how I can retrieve the data from one of the striped drives would be appreciated.
Again, this is the second enclosure that has failed on me with this Fantom MDN 1000. The first time it happened, I bought a brand new enclosure and then just swapped the drives and I was back in business. The second time it happened, I bought another enclosure and again swapped out the drives. The third time it happened, I figured out it was the power supply so I swapped out the power supply on one of the other units and got it back again. This time, it appears to the the enclosure again, so without any new enclosures available, I'm stuck.
This is why I use software raid. You have full control over what is going on, can directly validate the health of the individual drives (SMART—enclosures often do not support this or lie) and can perform verification and data scrubbing to validate that the drives are good copies of each other. You can also break apart and recreate the arrays to repartition or recreate the filesystems without booting to an install/rescue partition. Hosts are generally faster at computing checksums except for the very high end systems. – Seth Robertson – 2011-05-24T22:14:08.710