“Seriously, $800 to recover the data from my 1TB WD hard drive? “
When we get a physically damaged 1TB hard drive in for data recovery, we generally try and keep our fees between $700-$1000. These are cases where there is physical damage to the disks and read/write heads. The only way to recover the data is to replace the damaged heads. No one sells new heads to data recovery companies so we are forced to buy working drives that we can cannibalize for parts like the read/write heads.
Furthermore, when we replace the heads we must match some specific drive specs in order to ensure they are compatible with the original drive heads. So we must match thing like the DCM Code that you can find on the lid of any Western Digital hard drive. As a result there are many vendors who realize that we need a specific drive and have bumped the price way up to reflect the rarity.
Here is an example of crazy pricing on a 1TB WD hard drive …
This particular drive was one of the 1st series of 1TB portable 2.5″ drives offered by Western Digital. With that periods technology, the only way to reach the 1TB capacity was by adding an extra disk. This meant the drive would NOT fit in any normal laptop and thus the drive was only used in thicker external drive configurations. As a result, they never made that many, and the ones they did, are getting old and are prone to more frequent disk damage as they have more disks/heads and are also heavier. When they get dropped they cause a lot of internal damage.
If we try and do data recovery on a 1TB drive like this model at our regular fees of $700-$1000 and we need to order 2 parts drives, you can see it’s pretty hard to make any money, especially when we only get paid if we are successful. We are taking all the risk with $300-600 invested in parts. This is why in many such cases we must quote a higher fee OR have the client purchase or pay additional fees for the parts if they request a lower recovery price from us.
This is not an isolated case. There are thousands of rarer older drives that eBay & other vendors and have used to create lucrative businesses. I hope this helps explain one more reason why some data recovery cases are priced much higher.
© 2019, David Foster. All rights reserved.
Leave a Reply