Both my mirrored HD failed at the same time!!

[Dratsab]

I had some important data on it

what I have tried so far:

1)breaking the mirror, that only got out some of the data before it stopped
2)re attaching it into diff sata ports
3)swapping the hdd circuit board and plugging in back into the sata ports
4)plugging it in through usb

MY first questions is are the any other ways besides the above to recover the data?

Secondly what could have caused both drive to failed at at the same time?
and Thirdly should I replace a specific component on the desktop computer to minimise the probability of this happening again.

Please forumers help me to recover the date and I will built a shrine of you with daily offerings of a mysterious white and milky goo.

 

[Dratsab]

the mirror was created with windows disk management

 

[JimmiG]

If both drives physically failed, the data is probably gone.

If it's a software related issue with the mirrored volume, recovery might be possible, though you probably made it worse by swapping the disks and PCB's around.

 

[BSim500]

1)breaking the mirror, that only got out some of the data before it stopped
2)re attaching it into diff sata ports
3)swapping the hdd circuit board and plugging in back into the sata ports
4)plugging it in through usb

MY first questions is are the any other ways besides the above to recover the data?

- Try them on a different computer / motherboard? (Will rule out controller problem on motherboard)?
- Try different SATA cables? (Unlikely to solve it but it'll rule it out)
- Swap out the PSU? (Do you still trust it? What are voltage reading like?)
- What are temperatures like where the drives are located?

Failing everything else, there are specialist data recovery services who can physically disassemble the drive in a clean room and use special machines to read the platters directly (bypassing fried controllers / heads). Expensive & time-consuming, but if the data is irreplaceable...

Secondly what could have caused both drive to failed at at the same time? and Thirdly should I replace a specific component on the desktop computer to minimise the probability of this happening again.

Possibly power spikes / surge / faulty PSU if they both died at the same time (assuming it's hardware)? Surge protectors / UPS may help, but the ultimate insurance against that is to always have at least one offline backup. NAS / RAID / mirrored drives is not a backup solution by itself (RAID is about redundancy of uptime, not a "cold storage" replacement). Imagine if your PC / NAS died completely (struck by lightning / burnt to a crisp in a fire / stolen by burglars). You buy new drives to replace it, but where would you recover any irreplaceable data from? If there is no secondary backup outside of stuff that's plugged in all the time (eg, external USB drive or set of BD-R's, etc, hidden away somewhere), then that's the first thing that needs addressing. Always have a secondary / tertiary backup in addition to whatever mirrored drives you have.

 

[Nashemon]

How have they failed? Does the BIOS recognize them? Do they spin up? Does Windows see them? Does Windows say they are RAW and want to format them?

 

[Elixer]

I would also mention what does SMART show for both drives?
Use crystaldiskinfo to see the HD's SMART values.