Hi.
There are some good points in this discussion. But what i realised is that this forum is made up of allot of professionals that offer to help innocent and un-knowing new comers. Its almost like a venus fly trap
BUT
there are some genuine nice people on here- when there's money to made.
Here is some advice. Data Recovery and Computers - nothing in common. It is a completely different way of working with hardware. IN computers you get hundreds of motherboards, plug in ram, cpu,hdd, gpu some watts and off it goes- no order
In HDD's - You have a million motherboards- and only 1 chance;sometimes only last 3-5 minutes.
I am only new in DR- 4 months in learning, like some people mentioned here- I made a nice website, flash animations, cool looking buttons some nice information , easy to use - i have been getting more calls by the day. But I dont know much about recvoery- last weekend I read a forums of some shmack that swapped plattes in the living room- gues what i did- took 7 spare hard drives and tried todo what he did.
Outcome- 7 Dead hardrives within minutes. Problems start after you remove the cover instantly. That was just an experiment- i try to outsource all physical damage because i need anothr £5-20k to get proper equipment to do this- and NOPE- nobody on this forum told me about which equipment - what about experience.
You said SalvationData costs the same as PC-3000?? who are you talking too? i haggled them ppls for 6 months i got my whole kit at *bleep* way cheaper than first offered - hahahah

kit (all HD Doctors, DataCompass RAID, the the platter tools i will never use - anybody wanna buy? some cheepo tools, connectors, convertors and all that)
Im still new at DR so i actually still wanna type something -but to be honest i open some threads up and read the first 2 lines- i think to myself OMG! what the hell are you on about, next thread.
For what you are saying - i really would recommend SalvationData's Datacompass - You wont need to use recovermyfiles ever again- if the drive spins up and show in bios- 90% success rate (sometimes you need to tweak something, like seagates 7200.11 fw bug, or you get nas drives that create 16kb blocksizes)
-But then again i never used pc-3000-so i cant compare
There are cases where 'dead' drives can be fixed in a matter of minutes; but business is business my friend- and not even i want to document and freely distribute that info.
Buckle up and welcome to the battle of crucial info.