Factors Affecting the Cost of Disk Data Recovery

Costs of data recovery in generally do not depend on the amount of data required. In fact, it depends very much on the complexity of job. In general, hard disk drive recoveries could be divided into two types:

a. If there is no damage to internal hard disk servo-assembly, the disks could be worked on in normal room environment. Examples could be electronic fault to PCB controller board, logical system corruption, file deletion etc. However, even in this case, there could be several variants such as types of operating system used and the severity of file system corruption. If the disk is some very old or unusual type, the cost of aquiring the correct parts could be high. The costs of recovery will vary from low to mid range.

b. Otherwise if there are problems with the internal disk servo-assembly or disk spindle motor, one had to open up the disk in a class 100 clean room or clean lab to work on further. In this case, the costs of recovery will vary from mid to high end of the price range.

There are other factors in consideration such as the size and model of hard disk used, types of hard disk (IDE, SCSI or SATA), hard disk form factors (3.5", 2.5", 1.8" or CF Type II) etc.

Another critical factor is how the disk has been worked on by the user, the support engineer, other recovery agents before sending in to us as this will directly affect our job complexity.

There will also be situation whereby there is physical as well as logical damage, making the recovery job extremely complex, if not impossible.

This is the reason why we need to perform an evaluation in order to pin point the types of resources needed for data recovery and hence the exact costs of recovery.

See our data recovery pricing guide for more details.