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Recommended HDD Recovery Services

S

Shadow Lord

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 15, 2010
Messages
3,305
Location
California
Hello All,

Not sure if this is the best sub for this (Maybe off topic?) but I have Seagate ST3753330AS SATA HDD that no longer mounts/is recognized by the OS. I was actually in the middle of backing it up when it went kaput. I am thinking of getting a professional recovery service to do the work. I did some quick googling and checking on reddit and the prices don't seem as outrageous as before. Yes there are still places quoting $6K but it seems like a few hundred dollars is the going rate now. The data is old pictures, videos, and docs. They would be nice to have but not mission critical. I have low res backups elsewhere but would like to get the originals. So has anyone worked with any data recovery services that are local in LA (preferably SGV?) I say ybd-recover.com recommended. However, while they work on apples they don't advertise HDD recovery. I have been warned away from werecoverdata.com. TIA!
 
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I've heard good things about these guys. No personal experience though
www.300dollardatarecovery.com

$300 Data Recovery

$300 Data Recovery provides Hard Drive, RAID, SSD, and Flash data recovery services in Los Angeles & Hollywood. BBB A+/5,300+ Reviews
www.300dollardatarecovery.com www.300dollardatarecovery.com
 
maxtherabbit said:
I've heard good things about these guys. No personal experience though
www.300dollardatarecovery.com

$300 Data Recovery

$300 Data Recovery provides Hard Drive, RAID, SSD, and Flash data recovery services in Los Angeles & Hollywood. BBB A+/5,300+ Reviews
www.300dollardatarecovery.com www.300dollardatarecovery.com
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Thanks. I submitted a request to see what they say. I probably have a few versions of this drive around if they want donor parts.
 
I've watched some youtube videos of people doing HDD recovery and it's pretty interesting. It seems that most of the smaller shops are using something called PC3000 that allows some low level access to the drive.
www.acelab.eu.com

Catalogue

ACE is a pioneer in professional tool development for the HDD repair and data recovery industries. Our purpose-built solutions combine best-of-breed technologies, world-class solutions and deep-rooted expertise gained over the last 28 years. PC-3000 systems are now being sold worldwide, in 120...
www.acelab.eu.com www.acelab.eu.com

I wonder if any of those PC3000 systems ever come up used. I'm not seeing any on ebay right now, but I'll bet it would be fun to play around with.
 
jafir said:
I wonder if any of those PC3000 systems ever come up used. I'm not seeing any on ebay right now, but I'll bet it would be fun to play around with.
Click to expand...
I think there is a newer model out. It's not crazy expensive but definitely not a hobbyist item. At least not this hobbyist LOL
 
Thanks everyone for the replies. I actually found a local shop about 10 minutes away. The owner was very forthcoming and easy to work with with set prices. $300 if no HW failure and $900 if there was HW failure. Best of all diagnostics are free no matter if i do repairs or not. So I drove there with the drive and he hooked it up to his "secret" test rig in the back. I figured if it's major hw issues (e.g. head replacement) I was going to let it go.

Luckily no major HW failures were found. Head 2 was having trouble reading data off of the inner parts of a platter so without a ton of work that data is toast but everything else would be easy to get.

I will report back when I have the drive back and see how much data they were actually able to save.
 
To update everyone I ended up using Five Star Data Recovery a local specialty shop. They had the drive for about two days and extracted 99% of the data (there was one XML file they did not get which was not a big deal). I moved all the recovered files off of the HDD I had given them to my NAS so I can now sort through them to see what was really on the drive. Over all I would recommend them for recovery of home data: reasonable price, quick, and painless. Now if you have mission critical data that I don't know about. They do have a clean room and do HW repairs (PCB swaps, head replacements, etc.) but I did not need those services.
 
Thanks for the update!

For future reference, I'll put this here. I've gone through Seagate before, they were about $700 in 2019. Pretty sure that was a flat rate, but of course, seagate drives only. Perhaps their rate is lower now with more independent shops popping up.
 
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