Use two external hard drive docks to retrieve data from RAID 0 disks

I haven't tried FW800 specifically but we use a lot of OSX-RAID1 on internal drives and i used it once on FW400.

You just have to create a mirrored disk set from the external disks in DiskUtility. You should use the whole disks and let DiskUtility do the partitioning. That makes it easier to rebuild and boot off the set.

You can also start out with data already on one disk, then create a degraded set on a second disk, copy everything over and integrate the first disk into the set but this requires some non-supported use of command-line diskutil. The same goes for creating partitions on the RAID set or creating a RAID out of partitions. (All of which is perfectly normal and handy on e.g. Linux)

Sorry to say this but not very likely.

Especially if the HDD was used after the deletion for any period of time. The problem is that once files and directories are deleted there locations are removed from a table that maintains where they're located on the HDD. When these items are deleted, it's often the case that the data will remain on the HDD but just the location information is deleted, but the space they were using is released back into the available pool for reuse.

As new files are written to the HDD, this space, or portions of it, will get reused by the system with newly written files and directories.

So even if someone were able to recover these files & directories, they'd be only able to recover portions of them if anything.