I would like some opinion if any data can be retrieved from this Hard Disk, a raw image will be fine.

Unfortunately I have the terrible Seagate 3TB hard disk that died on me.

Here is an image of the scratched platter (this was taken by a local DR in a clean room).

The famous "D"a"M"n series

If other surfaces are the same, it is not possible to recover. In otherwise, there is a good chance to get partial result.

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http://www.alfadatarecovery.com

The local data recoverer took around 30 mins to take this picture after I dropped it off. I am not sure if he even looked at the other platters. Any recommendations on where to send this? I can mail this to any location in USA.

What is your budget? And how much are you willing to spend on parts to attempt a recovery?
It is the cost of parts and labor for potentially little to no success that makes the recovery effort unjustifiable.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I would just like a better understanding of what is recoverable if anything. And approximate budgets for each recovery option. I know a cheap recovery option such as trying to ghost the HDD or changing the PCB is obviously out of the question. I will definitely also not spend the 10K I seen in some other threads mentioned for the Japanese firm.

As Martin pointed out earlier in the thread, it does depend on whether the other platters are scratched.

In reality, I don't even really remember what is in this hard disk. But generally I like to put things to a close and get some finality whether I should just chuck this hard disk and abandon the effort.

Understandable.

Well, let's say the quote is $5000. Good? If not, what is your counter?

Techs don't want to waste their time if the offer is not serious.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I would be willing to pay around $2500.

i am assuming there is no urgency to do this as well as long I store it well am I right?

You should be fully aware of type of recovery result you're going to get before you agree to pay such a fee. Anything larger than a few Mb in size is already hopelessly lost. So you can forget about getting back things like videos. In all likelihood you're going to get back just a mix match of smaller files which may or may not even contain anything you want recovered.

When I see drives like this come into my lab, I don't even offer a recovery quote because the customer is never happy with the final result. You need to be aware that you're gambling a lot of money on what's most likely a lost cause.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Hi,
What Are You Looking for In this Drive What Kind Of Data .I Am Willing To Take This Case in this Condition if i know a few things i want to hear .

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

That's a very helpful comment. I do have some videos inside but I don't care about any of them.

What I am probably looking for will only just be pictures. (Standard JPG or GIF files). The pictures might be larger than a few Mb though considering the large size camera take pictures nowadays but I will settle for smaller export versions which I probably have saved or thumbnails.