Recommend data recovery company?

B00ze wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) 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.

There's the cost of the personell.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/d...RCH_KO0,22.htm

The highly specialized lab equipment is very expensive. There's the
cost to train them on the lab equipment (unless they manage to hire
someone away from a competitor with the exactly the same gear). There's
the cost to setup, run, and continually maintain a clean room even when
there's no work being done. There's also the salaries of all the other
employees.

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.

If they had millions of customers like McDonalds then they could spread
their costs over all those customers. A hundred customers over which
all those much higher salaries and much more expensive operating costs
are spread will not be so blessed with the economy of volume sales. I
don't how many sales might be typical in a year for drive recovery
services; however, I strongly suspect it is a hell of alot less than the
75 burgers per *SECOND* that McDonalds sells while using simpleton
equipment with minimum-wage employees instead of the very pricey
specialized lab gear along with employees that make 4-5 times, or much
more, per hour than that of a McDonalds employee. You want someone with
the expertise of a McDonalds employee using their toolbox gear to
recover your data?