[RKDinOKC]

First drive was internal 80gig laptop size in a mac mini. Told me it looked like the head came loose and scratched the disk too much for them to attempt recovery before actually broke and crashed. The second drive, an external I used for backup...they said the backup files were evidently made while the head was going out and garbaged them too much for their recovery software to make any sense of the data. I figure the sites were serving okay only because they are mostly static and were serving from cache while all the corrupting was going on.

I have most of the files for the web sites I am hosting, the only problem is that I did a LOT of custom editing to 3 sites CMS that were not local files and all the mysql cms database stuff. Plan to put a new drive in the old mac mini and make it my development server and push site updates.

Sid, you are welcome to the trash crashed drive it is an 80 gig serial ATA 2.5 inch laptop drive. The backup drive I can just zero out, reformat and keep using. The second drive was fine, the backups were just copies of corrupted files due to to loose head.

The plus side is I can ditch a few old sites that I was hosting for clients that aren't active any more. Save me a few bucks keeping their DNS registration alive.
Also the new server monitors the raid and messages me when the mirror degrades so I can slap a new drive in and let it rebuild while the server is still running.
I didn't think $1000 was too expensive for a server with 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 500gig drives and the Mac 64 bit server software licensed and pre-installed. I would love to get another one for my mail server box, also running on a mac mini.