Setting up RAID Storage in the Future

I finally got my PC from college back to my house where I was going to plug in my old SSD and HDD which contained my installation of Linux and a bunch of miscellaneous files, old previous website posts, things from high school, and things I was hoping to put back on this new virtualized server. I somehow had an old cable left from a power supply I don’t have anymore and I thought it was one from my current power supply in my PC. I plugged it in and had both the drives connected to it and the PC flashed once then went dark and I realized I probably had the wrong cable. I found one that had 2 SATA power connectors on it and used that, but the PC turned on and didn’t recognize the drives. I think I fried the controller on both and was going to open them up to see but decided to pursue professional data recovery just in case I hadn’t messed them up too badly.

I have no idea what was on my HDD; I was just using it to store large files I didn’t want taking up SSD storage and wouldn’t need to access again because of the slow read/write times so I’m okay with that being gone. Not much on my SSD is irreplaceable so if they come back with a quote that’s not too expensive then maybe I’ll go through with data recovery. I was told by someone else that if my controller on the board of my SSD got fried then all my data is for sure gone so I chose a place that didn’t charge a diagnostic fee and I’m hoping they don’t mention the controller at all. Worst case if it’s too expensive I’m hoping all I have to replace is the SATA power and SATA data connectors on the outside since I could use a soldering iron and hopefully find a cheap replacement for that.

My next goal is gonna be to get enough money for a 6 TB (or 8 TB) HDD that I can set up mirroring to since this showed me how important backups are. I was backing things up to my server so I thought I was safe but backups of backups are best practice. All of this is showing me skills and lessons for the real world and I’m lucky I learned this one the hard way on my own hardware and didn’t lose data that impacts me financially at all. I’m also going to do some research into hard drive repair and see if I can add that to my list of skills by practicing on a potentially already dead drive.