Hitachi 7k250 dies

[zetto]

Well, I got a couple of those new Hitachi 7k250 (160 Sata) last october and setup a raid0 striped. Works like a charm until today. A few hours ago, during HD-intensive operation Windows crashes, saying something about kernel - the blue SoD flashed so quickly, I did not have a chance to read it all. After that, computer reboots and fails to find one of the Raid0 drives. I tried to resetting BIOS, reconnecting all connectors, cleaning the internals, even shaking the drives (yes, that desperate) to no avail. The Intel Raid bios report one of the drives missing (says drive 1 is missing, drive 0 is OK), and fails to initialize the Raid0. I have no idea how to proceeed. Luckily, I did make a backup relatively recently, but I did lose some important stuff I was doing the last couple of weeks.

To make story short, I would greatly appreciate any kind of ideas or suggestions on how to handle this. This is actually the first time an actively used HD dies on me, even though I owned PCs for the last 10 years, and had about a dozen of different HDs, so I have no idea about how to proceed from now. Thanks a lot guys!