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I keep all my photos an external hard drive which is set up as a mirrored RAID with two 400GB hard drives. I've been noticing that it's been making a lot of noise recently and not turning itself off properly when the computer it connects to shuts down so I've sort of been expecting it to start dieing soon. Yesterday was the first day that it struggled to connect properly to the computer once it had power taking around half an hour with fiddling and turing it on and off to get Windows to recognise it as a drive. I managed to copy off all my photo stuff onto a spare external hard drive and began archiving the other things on there to CD / DVD and generally house cleaning my PC. This morning, while the drive successfully connected it induced its first blue screen of suicide (that's the one where the PC stops and starts outputting a memory dump file rather that just the bloe stop screen) while renaming a file on it. My computer is currently downloading vista SP1 update but when it finishes I'll see if the external drive is readable at all as there is still things on there (but thankfully not photo related) that I'd quite like to save if possible.

I wonder if the worse comes to the worst if I can just break open the external hard drive, extract the two drives and connect them seperately to my computer since it has both SATA and IDE connections? It was a mirrored RAID so the contents should be complete on each disc, right?