I understand that $650 is actually not high in comparison to other professionals, but it's simply way too much for me.

And the difference between this and a car is I can actually work on my car with nowhere near the risk.

It's a sucky situation to be in.

I wish HDDs weren't so complex. I can't wait until SSDs go down in price.

That's fair enough, if you can't pay and you are prepared to take the risk then by all means give the DIY a shot.

I wish you all the best of luck and hope it works out for you.

btw SSD's are even more difficult to recover from, expect $5000 to recover from one!!!

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thanks.

Although expensive to recover, an SSD probably wouldn't have failed in this situation since it doesn't have moving parts.

I'll just have to make sure I make backups more often.

OUCH !!!!

BTW, I burnt my bridges loooong ago. :mrgreen:

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

willied you need to have a good backup scheme so your not in the predicament you are now. I realize you know this as well. Keep in mind SSD drives just die no warning like current drives no mechanical parts and yes you can search here for posts of users with SSD drives that just stop working one day no warning. Recovery is very labor time intensive which is why the avg cost is higher. Don't fool yourself thinking they are that more reliable or wont die on you. Backup is the only insurance from disk failure.

If you go for an SSD drive, then choose one that has a bank of backup "super" capacitors.

SSDs typically fail catastrophically, not physically, but logically. AIUI, if the drive loses power while it is updating the LBA-to-physical-block translator, then the flash controller will power up in safe mode, leaving you without access to your data. The translator is in a constant state of flux due to the controller's wear levelling action.

The following article talks about lookup table failures in flash drives, but I expect that SSDs would be susceptible to similar issues:
http://www.salvationdata.com/forum/topic1873.html

Here is one discussion where an Intel SSD user states that he was able to kill his drives at will simply by power cycling them:
http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/forums ... 00371.html

SandForce SSD controllers have also been getting a lot of bad reliability reports in the user groups.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I did think about the fact that an SSD wouldn't really give you any warning, so that is a negative. Hopefully one day they will be cheap and super reliable as well. I won't be buying one anytime soon.

Forget they will become cheap per MB / GB like HDDs with same trend.
AND 90% of failures are EXTERNAL , just like HDDs. The problem is usually later discovered between chair and keyboard or on an accessory of the owner called "wallet"

Haha, that is very true.

Some more bad news...

I bought a Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb 7200RPM HDD off Newegg, got it today, and it didn't even finish Windows setup before it failed...I didn't mishandle it at all, it was working fine for about an hour. Now it's clicking and I'm shipping it back tomorrow.

Another bad thing is that I'm going away for 3 weeks on the 19th, and I won't have a replacement HDD by then, so I went ahead and bought another. Do you guys think I should keep the extra drive as a backup or sell it on eBay?

Actually the price you were quoted seems to be right on the mark. I charge $750 for businesses or $650 for personal drives for anything that involves the use of a clean room. You have to remember that a clean room isn't cheap to maintain. Costs me $200 per filter every time I have to replace them. Also drives that require going inside them have a lower success rate of recovery, so there's a better chance of wasting hours working on it just to come up empty handed and get paid nothing. Just yesterday I spent 2 hours doing a head swap and another 3 hours attempting to rebuild the firmware just to find that I can't get anything back off the drive since the service area is completely toast. No recovery = no pay = big waste of my day.

So $650 really isn't too much. I'd wonder about anyone who charges less than that. I'd be loosing my shirt to do it for less.
Unfortunately that's the price of not backing up your data.

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

I'm glad you posted that, it makes it easier for me to understand why it costs what it does. I'd hate to be working on a drive for hours only to find out it's a dud. It's a shame HDDs are so expensive to work on, when they cost so little. Oh well, let's just hope it doesn't happen again.