It’s the same drive; the prices quoted by both firms could be either £250 or £2000, and in neither case would they necessarily be wrong. There are four key factors that determine the cost difference, so when you’re getting a quote you should know these factors because then you’ll know what you’re reading.
The amount of your data barely matters. What does matter is if the drive needs opening; if donor components need to be sourced; and how many devices (e.g., servers) may have to be rebuilt/recreated from the recovered data.
Whether the drive must be opened. A logical recovery (deletions, corrupted filesystems, formatted volumes) is simply deskwork with an image. Mechanical failures require hands-on repairs within the physical drive using spare parts (donors) and are often significantly more expensive and take hours to complete. Donor availability. Common drives have readily available donors; an uncommon/old drive may take longer to find and that time can cost you. Number of devices. A single disk is one image; an eight-member RAID array is eight individual images in addition to the rebuild process. Urgency. Some companies will charge higher fees for after-hours work; this is acceptable as long as they clearly state their fee structure upfront.
Storage capacity is almost irrelevant to recovery cost: it is less expensive to recover 200GB from a good HD than 20GB from one that has failed in its motor.
In terms of recovery costs across the UK marketplace, you can expect to pay £150 to £400 for USB sticks/memory cards, £250 to £800 (depending on whether the device needs opening) for individual hard drives/SSDs; £500 to £3000 for RAID/NAS/servers based on member count and condition; and specialist items (forensic, CCTV etc) which require reverse engineering will be even greater due to this requirement.
Our own figures are at the low end of these price ranges. They are also displayed rather than being provided individually: memory cards & USB sticks £250+, single disks £300+; flat rate for Fusion Drive Macs £550; RAID & NAS £500+; flat rate for BitLocker £800 and CCTV £300, all plus VAT. Please see our pricing page for a complete listing.
If you have to pay only after your lost data is recovered then you get no charge at all if the recovery attempt fails, but do read carefully what qualifies as “recovery” and whether there is an initial payment (deposit) expected. We, and most other companies in this field, expect some sort of deposit when we will need access to and perform physical work on drives, since the cost for either a replacement part or bench time is incurred whatever the outcome of a case. The standard rate of deposit for our company is 50% and the remaining amount is owed upon successful completion of the recovery attempt. Forensic and CCTV cases are generally billed by everyone regardless of the result of the investigation simply because the results of the evidence gathering process provide valuable information to whoever is paying, regardless of the findings.
Genuine red flags include a low headline price which increases once the drive has arrived, the diagnostic being charged for, & pressure applied to authorise work without giving you a written quote.
Turn off your drive as soon as possible: a drive turned off as soon as it starts showing symptoms will be less expensive to recover from than one driven for another two weeks. Do not even consider DIY recovery on your failing drive: a six-hour scan of a drive with failing heads could potentially turn a £300 job into a £700 one, or make recovery impossible. Send us the entire external enclosure with the bare disk included: a bridge fault in the enclosure is cheaper to fix than an initialised bare disk.
Generally: between £150 and £400 for USB sticks and memory cards, between £250 and £800 (depending upon whether they have to be physically opened) for a single hard drive or SSD and between £500 and £3,000 for RAID, NAS and servers. Our charges begin at £250 +VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive.
The amount of money you will have to spend depends on complexity rather than size. Do you need to open the drive? Do you require donor components? Are we reconstructing multiple units simultaneously? All of these factors contribute to the majority of cost differences. We can recover 200 GB from a good unit for less money than recovering 20 GB from a unit that has a seized motor.
Barely. Pricing is based on the effort to access your data as opposed to the volume of data itself. For example, a nearly empty unit with failed heads would cost significantly more than a fully populated unit with a corrupted file system.
There are no costs if your recovery does not succeed, however, please review the terms regarding deposits and exceptions. Most jobs requiring physical intervention (i.e., opening the drive etc.) will include an initial deposit because we expend donor components and labour costs regardless of job outcome; our standard deposit is 50% with the remaining due after successful completion. Forensics and CCTV work typically do not qualify under most circumstances.
Once symptoms occur, do not run recovery software on a failing hard drive. Stopping use and sending an external drive (with its case) to us saves money by reducing the likelihood the job moves beyond the cheaper category.