Western Digital My Book World Edition II NAS device - crashed?

["Bob Cagle" <bcagle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been using a My Book World Edition II NAS device at home for
storing photos and such.  It only connects via Ethernet and has two
500gb drives in it spanned into one 1tb volume.  

 

Over the last couple of weeks, it has been locking up.  The only way to
get it back up was to force power it off and turn it back on.  Well, as
of last week, now it won't even turn on.

 

I have several files on here I would like to recover.  Western Digital
tells me to send it into a data recovery service - minimum charge is
$500-$800.  Yikes.

 

Some other thoughts I've had:

 

The drives are removable, so I could take them out and slave them into
another PC, and recover the data from there.  Since the drives are
spanned though, I'm not sure if that would work.

 

Or, I could buy another MBWE II device just like it, and swap the old
drives into the new device.  Then, get my files off, swap the drives
again, and return the new device back to the store.  This might work
assuming that the drives themselves are still good and will spin up.

 

Anyone have any other suggestions?

 

Thanks

Bob