Great explanation. Yes - I’ve done this before! Built up a system with a RAID array but then realized I wanted a different boot drive. Didn’t really want to wait for dual 15Tb arrays to rebuild - and luckily for me, I didn’t have to! Because the metadata is saved on the discs themselves. If I had to guess (I could be wrong though) - I believe ‘sudo mdadm —scan —examine’ should probably bring up some info about the discs, or something similar to that command.

Is it a hardware raid or a software raid? If it’s software (not sure abt hardware), the discs themselves should have the array’s metadata on it, and you can just use mdraid & restart the array.

Windows on ARM is a steaming pile of garbage

You may be able to find scrapping places around you (e.g. metal scrappers) - my local scrapping place also takes circuit boards. Which gets me ~$1/lb or so. But they also just take misc. electronics for like $0.10/lb, phones are like $5/lb, etc. there’s prices for it all. Best part is, this way you can actually get paid for your trash, instead of doing it the other way around.