Do not under any circumstance buy from this vendor. They show lots of drives on their site but you WILL get ripped off. Here's what they did to me:

I purchased a drive from them. It arrived well packaged, however had a deep scrape in it and the PCB was terribly cracked as you can see in the below picture. It looks like someone dropped it then just packaged it up anyway. I RMA'd the drive following all of the RMA procedures. I even used certified shipping costing me $15.30. However they refused the shipment and the drive got shipped back to me anyway.

Then I put in a Paypal dispute. To Paypal they accused me of swaping the PCB for a customers, stating that data recovery companies routinely do this. This of course is a complete lie. Especially since the customer is the one paying anyway. I'm still waiting to hear back from Paypal to see if I can at least get my $58 back.

I believe they knew the drive was broken and figured they could pawn it off to another DR company. I noticed after that they offer DR services, so they have nothing to loose by screwing other DR companies. My guess is the drive was one of their former customers broken drives that they just sold off.

I'm not doing this as a smear campaign, I just think that other DR companies deserve to be forewarned so you don't get scammed.


Here's a picture of the garbage they sold me

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

Beside the damaged pcb, was the HDA at least good or was it FUBAR too?

I'm not sure. Given the condition of the drive I wasn't going to risk putting the heads into my clients drive. I always test the donors first to make sure they're good. Couldn't test this one.

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

If you have not taken the drive apart. Including the PCB from the HDA, I do not see a problem with the return. Most companies that ship to DR companies put a Warranty Sticker on the PCB as well. You should be able to get your money back. I'll also try to remember these guys and not purchase from them.

Anyway from the picture seems a fallen drive or someone tried to fiddle with a flat screwdriver from the side border to lift the PCB... Not a good thing in any case.

My guess is that it was damaged by a fork lift during shipping. It takes quite a blow to cause that kind of damage to a PCB.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

The package should have been badly crushed then....

correct as the screws have been removed before

I RMA'd the drive but they refused the return shipment. I'm still going back and forth with PayPal just trying to get my money back. The worst thing isn't the money, it's the fact that they accused me of swapping the PCB from a customers, and trying to scam them, when it's their own worthless employee who shipped it out this way.

Just avoid these idiots.

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