Thanks all. The Medea is past its warranty, but more critical to me is that, even though the unit can be repaired (only one of the four drives failed), it was a RAID 0 setup, which means data wasn't mirrored across all drives (which would have made fully data recovery likely). Now one-fourth of the data for each file is on the failed drive. These kinds of setups require special data recovery techniques that equate to about three to eight hours per drive of service time, and the hourly rates of the places that do this kind of work start at $120, hence the outrageous sum to try to recover the data. Was the animation good, yes, I humbley submit is was far better than good. But was it worth several thousand dollars to save? Not when I'm barely keeping afloat and looking for work. I suppose I could eventually get the RAID repaired and start all over. I do have about 50% of the base files saved as Pz3s. But rebuilding it as it was, besides being enormously frustrating, will take a long time (there was hundreds and hundreds of hours of rendering alone), and I don't know if my heart is in it anymore. I just wish I could find a data recovery shop that would cut me a break. They're use to having professional clients who have a budget for such things, not unemployed hobbyists on home PCs.

Intel Core I7 3090K 4.5 GhZ (overclocked) 12-meg cache CPU, 32 Gig DDR3 memory, GeoForce GTX680 2gig 256 Bit PCI Express 3.0 graphic card, 3 Western Difgital 7200 rpm 1 Tb SATA Hard Drives