My External Drive Woes

Amongst many external drives in my collection, I have a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500gb Triple Interface which all of a sudden decided to die on me.
The front blue light began to flicker dimly and I thought initially that it was simply Disk Activity/Access.. but it was not. I would hear the attempt to start the drives inside but it would end in 1/2 of a second.
Googled and Googled and everything pointed to bad and poor service, workmanship, issues left and right. Great, I was hosed :-(
But some of the articles pointed to some options, namely that my power supply could be bad. The model number for the power supply that came with my unit was 706479 or ACML-51

I went out to B&H Photo and purchased a spare Power Supply. I bought an updated model 710199 which is clearly labeled as non usable by LaCie on my model drive. But I decided to go ahead anyway... I was desperate. The original supply puts out 26W and the new one 34

I was very glad to see my drive power up again and show up as a drive on my system. I quickly moved off all my critical images off this drive.
Little did I know this was a dual drive, RAID0 array with two Western Digital 250GB drives inside. If there is a failure of either drive, all your data is hosed. This setup is good for high speed FW800 video editing or scratch space for NON-CRITICAL stuff... NOT for a backup device. I plan to dismantle the unit and use the drives in a new RAID1 enclosure for archiving.