[SOLVED] Late Uncle's Old Raid Array

Dreaded0

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Nov 25, 2021
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I've been studying to take the CompTia A+ exam and my teacher said that building my own router would be a great way to familiarize myself with hardware and software that wasn't super common place, so I asked around my family if anybody had an old computer parts. Well, Thanksgiving comes around and my Nanna gives me what i discovered to be a Venus T4 Raid array with four hard drives ( unknown make and capacity because i didnt want to risk damage with such old equipment for fear of things being a bit brittle after sitting in a shed since 2006 at the very least) that belonged to my late uncle who passed away while he was living with her. My uncle is the one who sparked my love for technology and computers so I would really like to try and recover the data if at all possible. I want to take out the HDD's but I'm not exactly sure how. I plan on taking it to my class and seeing what my teacher thinks but this is a rather exciting discovery for me as my uncle passed when I was rather young. Thank you in advance for anybody able to help. Below is everything I've found so far about the case at the very least.

https://www.newegg.com/ams-dc-4044bu/p/N82E16817332003
 

Dreaded0

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Nov 25, 2021
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Besides a discussion piece for your class, what are you looking to do with it?
Well, like I said I just want to know how to safely remove the drives without potentially damaging them or the data on them. I don't exactly have many tools or computer hardware experience as I mostly just game and piddle around with python as of right now.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Well, like I said I just want to know how to safely remove the drives without potentially damaging them or the data on them. I don't exactly have many tools or computer hardware experience as I mostly just game and piddle around with python as of right now.
Don't remove anything until you've exhausted all possibilities of extracting this ancient data.

Connect to a PC via USB and see what happens.
And of course the wall power cable.
 
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Dreaded0

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Nov 25, 2021
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Ah, I'm sorry, I should have said that the Power and usb cables are lost to time unfortunately. The only real way i could see the data would be to take them out and connect them to my PC if I'm not mistaken
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Ah, I'm sorry, I should have said that the Power and usb cables are lost to time unfortunately. The only real way i could see the data would be to take them out and connect them to my PC if I'm not mistaken
That changes the complexity and chance of data recovery success immensely.

USB is USB....easy to get a new one.
Power - I would seriously try to find what it used originally, and find something compatible.

Taking the drives out and connecting then to your PC almost certainly won't be recognized as whatever RAID type or the formatting it was originally.