[Trygve]

I have a 1.5TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro dive that failed. It sounds like one of the two drives is not spinning up. It is under warranty until December but I am in Europe so it is a hassle to ship it and I plan to bring it to the US when I am there in Nov/Dec.

This drive contains tons of confidential data... source code to all our products, financial and tax records, documents pertaining to unannounced products and business partnerships, thousands of photographs, a 150,000-word book manuscript, lists of passwords/accounts and more.

I am uncomfortable sending this in for repair under warranty, but some of the data is not backed up elsewhere due to lack of space.

What would you do? If I send this in to OWC how safe is my data assuming they get my drive working (it may be the controller board or something) - the data I am sure is still fine on the drive.

I am tempted to open it (thus voiding the warranty) to see if I can get the drives working - I may just need to buy a new case. This drive has been on nearly 24 hours a day for 18 months.

Thanks,

[OreoCookie]

Very often you will get a new unit (with new harddrives) and your data is definitely not safe. Are you even sure you can recover the data? Do you have backups of that data?
If the drive contains so much confidential and important data, I'm sure they are worth more than what new external harddrives cost.

[Trygve]

The data is valuable... I have backups of most and am not as concerned about recovering the data (tho that would be very desirable), but I am more concerned about how my confidential data is treated if they can for example, replace the enclosure controller board and have my drives work.

[mduell]

If one drive works and one drive doesn't, it's probably a drive failure instead of a controller failure. Since the OWC Mercury Elite Pro use RAID1 rather than JBOD, neither disk is readable on its own.

If you send the drive to OWC, they'll take the least-cost path to repair and make no guarantee about the safety (either in terms of preservation or disclosure to third parties) of your data.

If you need the data you don't have backed up, I'd send the whole enclosure to a data recovery specialist; it's not going to be cheap, but they can probably get your data back.