I had just recently bought a Fantec QB-35US3R to have a nice box on my desk to make some backups to. Along with the HDD-Bay I had ordered some 4TB HDDs to let them run in Raid 5, which is handled by the hardware RAID controller of the Fantec HDD-Bay. The QB-35US3R arrived a few days before the hard drives, so I got impatient and had the idea to put three old 1TB disks in the Fantec device, just to test it... Long story short: I made a backup of the most important data on these three disks before they broke. I had set the configuration scheme to RAID 3 at the Fantec device.

It seems, that the Fantec RAID controller has "somehow" destroyed the partitioning scheme or the file system, because when put into a HDD docking station, they get recognized by the OS (Ubuntu/Linux) but are not mountable anymore.

I tried to recover the data from one HDD via gParted (parted), which ran some hours without success. Here I stopped, before trying other tools, cos I read that the longer a hard drive is running after a the partitioning got destroyed, the worse it gets.

What could the HDD-Bay probably have done to my lovely hard drive disks? Is there some routine a RAID controller is executing, when it wants to create a RAID system? Like erasing the partition table (seems not plausible to me.) or writing some information to every hard drive in the RAID (seems more likely to me.)? Is there a chance to recover the data from these HDDs, or is the change a RAID controller makes so significant, that no software is of help?