In article , B00ze
wrote:
Rather than move the platters, why not move the controller (from the
good drive to the dud), if you think that's what's faulty? Doing that
might also be possible without breaking the seal on the housings.

Yeah, I will try that first if I decide the recovery labs practice
extortion.

Considering their costs, $1500 is cheap. It's not cheap when it is a
one-time cost out of your personal pocket. You could probably replace
your car's exhaust pipes for a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a
muffler shop but then it is irrelevant that your labor, materials, and
gear is cheaper to you because you can't do the job and have to pay
someone else. Just like you, they want a reasonable salary, too, and
they are in business to stay in business.

Considering that swapping heads/PCB (or moving the platters to a new
drive) is a one hour job, $1500 is a crazy per-hour salary.

you're paying for their expertise and skill, not an hourly rate.

they also have the proper equipment to use, including a clean room,
which isn't cheap.

you're also assuming it only takes an hour to recover a drive. recovery
is nowhere near as easy as you think.

And charging
more for bigger drives is nonsense - fixing physical damage takes the
same amount of time no matter how much data's on the drive.

false.

I need a
place that's flexible, where I can negotiate how much work gets done
before we call it quits. I don't want them spending 3 days trying to
rebuild a failed NTFS filesystem; I don't want to pay for that...

do you want your data recovered or not?
simple yes or no question.



The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to
recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you
earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating
costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales.
Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague
over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources
they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper.
Could be more expensive.

That's why I'm not really interested in places that say it'll cost
"$2000 or nothing" if they cannot do it -

if they can't do it, there is no cost.

I don't want them spending 40
hours on this, all I need is an engineer that's swapped parts between
drives before. If it takes more than that, I'll just chuck the drive in
the trash...

toss it.

it's clear that the data on it is not worth much to you.