Recovered a dead RAID array with a $20 USB bridge, shocked it worked

Last Tuesday a client brought in an old NAS with two drives that had apparently dropped out of their RAID 1. I figured the data was gone, but I remembered a tip from a forum about using a cheap USB to SATA adapter to read each drive individually. I picked up a $20 bridge at a local shop in Denver and sure enough, one drive had a corrupted partition table while the other was fine. By mounting the good drive read-only and using a free tool to rebuild the partition metadata, I pulled every single file off without touching the hardware. The client almost cried when I handed over a portable drive with their family photos. What surprised me most was how fragile the RAID metadata is, one bad power event scrambled it completely. Has anyone else had luck with this kind of software recovery on cheap consumer NAS boxes, or do you just send them to a lab?

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