Ask HN: Why is data recovery so expensive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is data recovery so expensive?

4 pointscdvonstinkpot5 comments

Hi,

My laptop recently suffered a hard drive failure. The boot-time diagnostics said "Short self test unsuccessful". It started as a file transfer slowing to 0 mb/s, then explorer.exe wouldn't display anything when I attempted to open "My Computer", then it wouldn't restart then it wouldn't boot.

The local "Geek Squad" said recovery would likely be between $1k-$10k, depending on the severity of the failure. Other 'data recovery' services online quote similar amounts- always in the thousands of dollars.

I understand it could require swapping the platters into a working drive, but I don't imagine that being such a costly procedure. Quite possibly I'm wrong on this assumption.

I can't help but wonder if these businesses are capitalizing on the hostage-like nature of data recovery & are price-gouging based on that.

Does anyone here have experience with this sort of thing & could enlighten me on it?

Thanks,

-c

I had a disk that failed that had personal pictures that were valuable enough to spend the required 350$ to recover the disk.

While I was looking for someone to do the job, I have had the chance to talk with people that do this and ask them about the pricetag.

There are 2 kinds of people that recover data from hard drives:

- Companies that build and maintain a "white-room" or clean-room that respects a certain ISO standard about the size of the dust so that it won't harm the hardware. They employ highly qualified technicians, and most of their work is for other businesses not individuals. Their prices are high because the cost to maintain all that is high.

The second category are freelancers (like the guy I ended-up using), they only have store fronts, they take disks from clients and when they have enough disks, they rent a "white-room" by the hour from one of the companies I talked about before. Their prices are a bit lower than the first ones, but they're still high because renting the white-room still costs a bit of money.

What really gets me is how often a clean room is not required and yet they still recommend & charge clean room prices.

IE: The MacBook Pro/Seagate failures were all(predominately) controller failures, yet the "geniuses" parroted clean room, clean room, clean room for every instance I am familiar with(admittedly, a small sample size). Slap a new external controller on & cha-ching!

> I understand it could require swapping the platters into a working drive, but I don't imagine that being such a costly procedure.

It may need to be performed in a clean room, which is likely expensive to set up and maintain. Perhaps it's the required equipment that drives up the cost?

I've wondered if data recovery shops distribute the cost of the intensive recoveries (e.g. swapping plates) across the smaller gigs (corrupt file systems and other stuff).

I can't help but wonder if these businesses are capitalizing on the hostage-like nature of data recovery & are price-gouging based on that.

You answered your own question. They don't charge based on the labor involved, they charge based on the value of the data to you. See also emergency plumbing service.

Consider supply and demand as well. It's not every day you need a data recovery service.

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