Will waiting before recovering HDD damage further?

[willgrier7]

My external hard drive fell from kitchen table (3-4 ft drop) a year ago. Tried recovering myself using software i purchased online to no avail. My hard drives have failed before but this was the first time I wasnt successful. Took it to a local recovery company and they couldnt recover so they referred me to Drive Savers. Secure Data recovery was near my house so I took it to them and they shipped it out overnight to their center in Pennsylvania. They got back to me with a $2800 quote with the following diagnostic results:


Diagnostics

Bad Sectors (Reallocation Errors)
Clicking Heads - Visible Damage (Smudges / Debris / Other)
Moving Parts Failure - Head Crash

Notes

The read and write heads have completely failed and there is some surface damage. The drive will need to be taken into the clean room and the heads will need to be swapped and the platters will then be imaged. Once the imaging process is complete the data can then be extracted.





My question:: I cant afford this, will they work with me on price or if this set in stone? If we cant agree to anything and I decide to hold off on recovery, will the passing of time make the drive less recoverable in the future? dont want to wait and then the drive cant be recovered in the future

Thanks!

[ShaneWard]

if the drive is stored in a safe place it will be fine as long as you need. Powering up the drive unnecessarily could be the factor that causes damage.

[lcoughey]

You may want to contact other labs for another pricing opinion. Here are a few forum members that I doubt would charge $2800...though, you didn't actually mention the model or capacity of the dropped drive.

Jono - http://www.datasaversllc.com
Jared - http://www.data-medics.com

And, of course, if you want to ship to Canada, me.

[willgrier7]

if the drive is stored in a safe place it will be fine as long as you need. Powering up the drive unnecessarily could be the factor that causes damage.

Thanks Shane. I will probably hold onto it for a bit because I will assume that any other company that has a clean room and can recover it will charge me at least $1500-2000 and I cant commit to that right now. Its a Western Digital 1TB drive