How to recover data from a RAID of internal drives after my comp dies?

So my desktop comp died and I have ordered a laptop instead of rebuilidng the desktop. I have a 4 internal drive RAID 5 (one of the drives is offline) connected to the mobo on my dead system and I want to copy the data from it ASAP to a healthy external drive.

Not sure how to do this b/c that old system is dead and I don't know of a way to connect my drives to my new laptop.

Anyone got advice on the easiest way to salvage that data?

How was the RAID created? Was it an Intel or AMD "hardware" raid? Was it an integrated HBA such as an LSI? SCSI, ATA or SATA? What was the OS, and was the RAID handled directly by the OS or was it presented as an array to the OS? What kind of drives are they? Did you boot from it or is it just a data array? Was the array complete and cleanly shut down the last time you used it? More information is needed for us to give you more help, but chances are you will need a desktop to remount the array for the additional concurrent ports or you will need some additional software to remount and scan through the image files you will need to create of your drives, and depending on your array type the software to recover may or may not be free. Before you do anything, do you have a backup? How important is the data? Do you have free space on another mountable device at least equaling double the combined size of the array drives in question?

Thanks.

I created the RAID in Windows disk management. It's 4 Deskstar HDD drives and I believe I created a RAID 5, with 1 disc redundancy.
It's just a data array, no OS.

With the exception of the 1 disc going down, it is seen/working just fine in Windows. My machine completely died due either to a faulty mobo or PSU. The drives with the OS messed up and the OS wasn't recognized so I couldn't boot to Windows. When I reformatted those drives and was able to boot into Windows, it soon died again and then the GPUs also weren't recognized by the system. In other words, a bunch of stuff started going wrong.

The data is important since it has a lot of important catalog metadata (ratings, copyright, etc) from Capture One Pro from my photo shoots.

I have most of the photos on the drives backed up to two other drives, but not the catalog metadata, which I very much want to recover.

No I don't have 18TB of free space on other drives.

I have had luck attaching drives with external USB adapters and booting to a Ubuntu district in the past. It would detect it was part of a software array and piece it together. Now the last time I had to do that was like 8 years ago and my memory isn’t the best but I do t recall having to do anything fancy to make it work.

That said raid 5 is the devil, I used to be all about it till I had one die and I was left with a crapload if nothing. Now I am all about the raid 10 arrays, faster writes and better tolerances.

Id say just restore your backup to a new single drive

If this is windows raid you should be able to transfer that to a different windows machine without any issue. I mean that is after you figure out how to connect the 4 drives to the laptop.

Note that older USB external docks will not correctly support drives of greater than 2TB they will likely cut the drive to 2TB or translate the sectors to 4KN (making your raid appear totally corrupt) or not work at all. I expect USB3.X stuff will work without issue.

Plug in another PSU and see if it works.
It might be that simple.
Then backup your data! RAID is not a substitute.

If you want a 100% recovery rate, bite the bullet and get another windows machine of some sort and put those drives in it and copy the data off. Then sell the machine. You can get cheap machines on ebay that will allow you to do this for minimal cost or check your local craigslist. If the data is valuable, this is a sure way to keep it.