Repair/recovery tool for Western Digital Elements (1TB)

Depends on what you want. If it is important for you that there is no downtime when one of your disks fails (and a disk fail has a much higher probability than an electronics/controller fail), use a RAID.

If it is more important that your data is safe (i. e. a backup), use separate disks and sync them manually (maybe even keep multiple generations as you can always accidentally delete important files).

A RAID is not a backup (in the rare case that the electronics fail). You will need a backup (at least if you think your data is somewhat important), but you will only need a RAID if uptime is important to you.

You can try TestDisk to see if you can fix the partition table and recover your data.

TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk can

• Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
• Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
• Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
• Fix FAT tables
• Rebuild NTFS boot sector
• Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
• Fix MFT using MFT mirror
• Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
• Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

TestDisk is free and open source software.