B00ze wrote:

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.

Did you ask them if they charge a fixed fee regardless of what they end
up repairing? I doubt it. If a simple PCB swab (along with moving over
the ROM chip or microcontroller if the ROM is inside there) would take a
lot less time and be a lower price. What they quote over the phone is
going to be exhorbitant because they don't yet know what they have to
do. Once you ship the drive to them, they can provide a much more
accurate estimate and then you can decide if you want to go ahead or
have them ship the drive back to you.

How would they know how much work it would take until they see it? Do
you expect an over-the-phone estimate of repairing your car's exhaust
based on "it makes more noise" from the muffler shop? They probably
won't even give you an estimate. They must see first. A PCB (and chip
swap) doesn't require a clean room nor highly specialist techs working
with ferromagnetic microscopes or other specialized and other pricey
equipment.

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.

Okay, you'll have to explain to me why trying to read through 10 GB of
sectors on a platter takes the same amount of time as trying to use a
ferromagneticscope on 1 TB of sectors. Ever format a driver? Yup, you
have, so you know it takes a lot longer to format a 10 GB drive than for
a 1 TB drive.

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...

Once they get the drive and can do an inspection, they should be able to
provide a more accurate estimate.

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 - 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...

Hmm, I don't remember calling a drive recovery service that said they
charged a minimum fee of $2000 (or quoted a minimum fee). Maybe I was
blessed in who I called (sorry, been too many years to remember who it
was plus it was for someone else's failed drive).

Have you called any of the recovery companies mentioned so far to see
how they quote estimates of unseen devices? Pick one that sounds most
fair, check they pay for return shipping, and the worst you're out is
the cost to ship the drive to them if upon inspection they quote a price
that is extreme compared to the value of the data on the drive (which
doesn't sound of much value from your descriptions).