Just received a quote to repair an HDD that went bad on my old laptop 5-6 years ago. Was quoted ~$1750 to retrieve data, really? Is this a rip off? [closed]

Solution 1:

It is entirely up to you whether your data is worth it to you. They should give you a guarantee of data recovered or no (or minimal) charge.

I had a drive with apparently a catastrophic failure that I gave to an agency (they quoted about $1,100 but charge only a nominal charge if no data recovered). No data was recovered and I paid the small charge. Fair all around.

Followup note based on discussion here: I would add the that the quote you got is reasonable and is not a "rip-off". Charges are made for clean room, analysis and labor.

Solution 2:

From your description of the drive being unrecognised by the BIOS and the recovery company's explanation it sounds as though the drive has hardware/mechanical damage or other low-level issues that require specialist tools (e.g. a manufacturer-specific firmware flasher) or physical disassembly/replacement of parts of the drive (e.g. controller board replacement, platter swap, etc.) in order to be able read the data. $1000 - $2000 is the typical price for this kind of service, and these are not tools that you would be able to buy yourself, or use correctly without specific knowledge and training.

However, I would recommend asking around for a quote or second opinion from another organisation. There may be places that offer a better price and if "The hard drive is unstable and has System Area issue." is a direct quote the clarity and grammar of this statement wouldn't give me confidence if I was about to hand $1750 over to this organisation. Some places also charge a lower fee (half, or even less) if they aren't able to recover the data.

Solution 3:

Of course, you can't use any of those do-it-yourself programs if the computer cannot recognize the drive. $1750 does seem high, and the usual advice for spending almost any money for services applies -- find at least three providers with decent reputations, and compare the quotes. $1750 seems quite low, for a worst-case scenario recovery where the provider has to build a new hard drive using the discs from your old one because of whatever is wrong. There's also recovery and there's recovery. Are they going to recover the file structure and file data (names, dates, etc), or will you just end up with a zillion files and good luck figuring out what they are and where they go? I had a HDD crash years ago that I used a well know recovery program for. What I ended up with was very frustrating. Many of the photo files, for example, had garbled sections. A recovered photo with only the top 1/2 of the picture isn't a great thing to have. So, my answer is: Check around. If you get 3 quotes that are in the range of $1750, that's probably a reasonable price for the difficulty of the task you're requesting.

Solution 4:

It won't help you now, but you should have tried to recover the data right after the failure happened: the magnetic field in those unstable sectors is only getting weaker as time passes, errors in the flash memory of the controller accumulate, head positioning becomes less and less precise as the lubricants harden, and any replacement parts needed for the recovery of an older driver become more and more expensive. It's entirely possible that 5 years ago you could have used one of those $50 recovery programs if the disk was still recognized by the computer (albeit unbootable), and the price tag in a recovery centre would have probably been lower too.

Regarding the situation now, it's entirely possible that the price is too high, but you won't know that unless you go to another business and pay the diagnostic fee there. Once the drive is undetectable using a computer, any opinion on how damaged it is or how much the recovery should cost is a wild guess unless the person giving you the opinion has actually diagnosed it.

Statistically speaking, $1750 is on the higher end of price tags for private customers, but not out of the range of reasonable.