In an unlikely event you experience a hard drive failure, you might have started looking for a reputable data recovery outlet. It takes a lot of research, some patience, and a good deal of luck to find one.
Data Recovery Labs: The Quality Aspect
The quality of all data recovery labs varies. I’ll elaborate: not all data recovery labs will provide the same level of service for quite the same money. Many things depend on their experience, benches, hardware and software tools they use for diagnosing and fixing the problem.
See, the very same issue with a hard drive can often be fixed in many different ways, leading to the same result (data read off the disk) but at very different costs. The same failed hard drive can be read by removing the plates and reading them on a bench (a very labor-intensive procedure requiring expensive specialized hardware) or by simply replacing a burned motor, which will cost just a few dollars. Unfortunately, too many data recovery labs lack expertise or experience required to correctly diagnose a problem, and this is not an overgeneralization.
I had a (physically) failed hard drive once. No software would see it. Computer’s BIOS would not see it. Yet, the spindles were spinning up, and the heads were making just the right noises. So I brought this up to the first recovery lab.
“It must be the main board”, they told me. “Find another drive just like this one, swap the main board, and that’s it. Or we can send it to the clean room and have its plates removed and read. That’ll cost you at least $300. Don’t want to do that? Fine. You owe us $20 diagnostics fee please.”
Wow. Okay. So I brought that disk to another company, making sure they don’t charge any sort of “diagnostics fees” upfront. “It’s a failed head control motor”, they said. “Around $300 to fix.” “And if it’s not?”, I asked. “You still have to pay for the labor”, they said. So I left.
Approaching the third company, I already knew what questions to ask. They looked at the disk and quoted $150 for data recovery. Fine. A few days later I received a call: “Your data is ready”. When I was there to pick up a pen drive with recovered data, I wondered what the problem was. “Worn out”, they said. “Heavily. We had to connect it to the bench and manually modify the reallocated sector table and some other structures.” Obviously there were no main board and no head control motor issues.
These guys were the authorized service center for brand X hard drives. As any OEM-authorized service center, they had the right people and the right hardware to diagnose exactly what’s wrong with that hard drive.
