Tom’s Hardware goes into Ontrack and reports on the world of data recover. Lots of good information on data recovery and costs. Recovering data from “RAID systems can reach the five-digit zone rather quickly”, so it’s definitely worth investing in a good backup mechanism before disaster occurs.
Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).