Recently I had a RAID5 array crash on me. The array was composed of 3 Western Digital 250GB disks controlled by a 3Ware 9550SX card. This array had been in continuous operation for nearly 4 years. Yet, about 12 days ago one of the drives appeared to have crashed. As luck would have it, though, the PSU was also failing in this box, so the +5V line stopped working and took another drive offline. That was the end of the array. 3Ware/LSI was a great help. They created a custom application that was able to recover the original RAID header information. After attaching a new PSU to the box, 2 of 3 drives were online and the LSI tool made the array online too (but degraded). That was zero day and I was still hopeful. I downloaded R-Tools linux recovery application and created a rescue CD. Stuck the CDROM into the failed system and started the recovery process. After about 4 days, R-Tools consumed the entirety of a 500GB disk that I had attached to the system and it was not done. So I gave up o...