The same drive can attract quotes of £250 and £2,000, and neither firm is necessarily being unreasonable. Four things drive the difference, and knowing them makes a quote readable.
How much data you have barely matters. What matters is whether the drive has to be opened, whether donor parts are needed, and how many devices have to be reconstructed together.
Whether the drive must be opened. A logical recovery — deleted files, a corrupt file system, a formatted volume — is desk work on an image. A mechanical failure needs clean-air work, donor parts and hours of careful imaging, and costs several times more. Donor availability. A common drive has donors on the shelf; an unusual or elderly one may need sourcing, and that time is real. Number of devices. A single disk is one job; an eight-member RAID is eight images plus the reconstruction. Urgency. Some firms charge a premium for out-of-hours work; that is legitimate provided it is stated up front.
Capacity is almost irrelevant. Recovering 200 GB from a healthy drive is cheaper than 20 GB from a drive with a seized motor.
Across the UK market, USB sticks and memory cards typically run £150–£400; single hard drives and SSDs £250–£800 depending on whether the drive must be opened; RAID, NAS and servers £500–£3,000 depending on member count and condition; and specialist work such as forensic analysis or CCTV recorders higher again because of the reverse-engineering involved.
Our own prices sit at the lower end of those ranges and are published rather than quoted case by case — cards and USB sticks from £250, single drives from £300, Fusion Drive Macs £550 flat, RAID and NAS from £500, BitLocker and CCTV £800 flat — all plus VAT. The full list is on our pricing page.
No fix, no fee means you pay nothing if the recovery fails — but check what counts as success and whether a deposit applies. Most firms, including us, take a deposit on jobs requiring physical drive work, because donor parts and clean-air time are spent whatever the outcome; ours is 50%, with the balance due only on success. Forensic and CCTV work is generally excluded from no-fix-no-fee everywhere, for the same reason: the analysis has value regardless of what it finds.
The genuine red flags are a low headline price that rises after the drive arrives, charges for the diagnostic itself, and pressure to authorise work without a written figure.
Stop using the device early — a drive powered down at the first symptom is cheaper to recover than one run for another fortnight. Don’t attempt DIY on a failing drive; a scan that runs for six hours on a drive with failing heads can turn a £300 job into a £700 one or an impossible one. And send the whole external enclosure rather than the bare disk, because a bridge fault is far cheaper to work around than an initialised drive.
Broadly: £150–£400 for USB sticks and memory cards, £250–£800 for a single hard drive or SSD depending on whether it must be opened, and £500–£3,000 for RAID, NAS and servers. Our own prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for single drives.
Because complexity varies, not capacity. Whether the drive has to be opened in clean air, whether donor parts are needed, and how many devices must be reconstructed together drive nearly all the difference. Recovering 200GB from a healthy drive costs less than 20GB from one with a seized motor.
Barely. Pricing follows the work required to reach the data, not its volume. A nearly empty drive with failed heads costs far more than a full drive with a corrupt file system.
That you pay nothing if the recovery fails — but check for deposits and exclusions. Jobs needing physical drive work usually carry a deposit because donor parts and clean-air time are spent regardless; ours is 50%, balance on success. Forensic and CCTV work is generally excluded everywhere.
Stop using the device as soon as symptoms appear, don’t run recovery software on a drive that is making noise, and send external drives complete with their enclosure. Each of those keeps a job in the cheaper category rather than pushing it into the expensive one.