If the cost of a retail license is a concern, consider these alternatives:

Before running any recovery software, create sector-by-sector images of each drive in the array. This allows you to work on copies of the data, keeping the original hardware safe.

Cracked versions of recovery software are often unstable. If the software crashes during the rebuild or scanning process , it can cause further corruption to the file system, making professional lab recovery impossible.

Most sites offering free license keys bundle their downloads with malicious code. In a RAID failure scenario, the last thing you need is a ransomware attack encrypting the very files you are trying to save.