'Not detected' describes a £200 job and a £900 job equally well. Symptoms overlap almost completely across faults, and the fault is what you're paying to fix — so no figure offered over the phone, before anyone has examined the drive, deserves your trust. The sequence that does deserve it runs: free diagnostic, then one fixed quote in writing, then your decision with no pressure attached.
What the examination establishes is which of four tiers you're in. Logical: the hardware is fine, the data's organisation isn't. Electronic: a failed circuit board or bridge. Firmware: the drive's own internal code has broken. Mechanical: heads or motor, and with them the clean room. Cost climbs tier by tier because parts, hours and equipment climb — nothing else moves the number.
For orientation: logical jobs on healthy hardware generally price in the low hundreds of pounds; board-level and firmware repairs occupy the middle hundreds; mechanical work with donor parts and clean-room time spans the upper hundreds and can cross a thousand; and multi-disk RAID, NAS and server recoveries price above single drives, scaling with drive count and complexity. One figure from our own sheet for calibration: a CCTV or DVR recorder recovery is £400 + VAT flat — forensic-class work, paid upfront.
Ranges orient you; they don't price your job. That's the diagnostic's whole purpose, and a fixed quote shifts the risk of surprises onto us: however awkward the fault turns out to be, the number you approved is the number invoiced.
The recurring tricks deserve naming. Headline prices 'from £49' that inflate on 'assessment'. Assessment fees that stick whether data returns or not. A standard tier slowed on purpose so the express tier sells itself. Success defined so loosely that one readable file out of thousands triggers full payment.
Cut through with three questions. One: is the diagnostic free even if I walk away, device returned? Two: once quoted, can the price move? Three: what counts as success, and are recovered files verified before I pay? Our answers, on the record: yes, free and returned; no, fixed means fixed; and success means the data you needed, checked. And our terms in one line — logical recoveries run no fix, no fee; drives carrying physical, electrical, water or fire damage pay 50% of the quote upfront for the invasive lab work; forensic-class jobs are paid upfront in full.
Three habits keep recovery bills down. Switch off early: the drive powered down at the first symptom is the cheap version of itself. Resist tool-stacking: every scanning pass over failing hardware deepens the eventual job. Post, don't summon: tracked postage costs pounds, and call-out visits cost multiples.
Start at the free online diagnostic, or read the page for your hardware first: NAS, RAID, hard drives, SSDs and external drives.
A real price has three parts: a diagnostic that cost nothing, a quote that cannot move, and no fix no fee on logical work. Anything offering two out of three is a sales funnel, not a service.
The diagnostic is free, the quote is fixed, and logical faults run no fix no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.