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Start Now!Is Everything Really $300?
No, and we’d rather say so plainly than let the name do the talking. $300 is the price for a hard drive, USB flash drive or memory card 1TB or smaller. Larger devices are $500 or $700, and SSDs are $500 regardless of size. Most jobs genuinely are $300, but not all of them.
This is the single most common point of confusion we deal with, so here is the whole picture in one place.
What is actually $300?
| Device | Price |
|---|---|
| Hard drive, USB flash drive or memory card, 1TB or smaller | $300 |
| Same devices, larger than 1TB up to 6TB | $500 |
| Any SSD up to 6TB, regardless of capacity | $500 |
| Phone or tablet, recovered in-house | $500 flat |
| Any device larger than 6TB | $700 |
| RAID or NAS array | Each drive at its own tier, summed |
| CD, DVD or floppy disk | $300 per disc |
In plain terms: a hard drive 1TB or smaller is $300 at $300 Data Recovery. The same drive between 1TB and 6TB is $500. Anything over 6TB is $700. Any SSD up to 6TB is $500. A phone recovered in our lab is $500 flat.
You can work out your own price from the label on the device before contacting us. That’s the entire point of pricing this way.
Why isn’t it one price for everything?
Because the work genuinely isn’t the same.
Imaging a 6TB drive sector by sector, on failing hardware that has to be read slowly and carefully, takes several times longer than imaging a 500GB drive. Charging the same for both would mean small jobs subsidizing large ones.
SSDs are their own case. They’re priced at a $500 floor because SSD labor doesn’t scale with capacity at all: a 256GB SSD needs the same controller-specific tools, thermal cycling and chip tracing as a 4TB SSD. Pricing a small SSD at $300 would misprice the work by a wide margin.
Is the price based on how much data I have?
No. It’s based on the device’s capacity, not how full it is.
A 4TB drive holding 50GB of photos is a $500 recovery, not $300, because we image the entire device either way. Failed drives don’t reliably report which sectors are in use, so the only safe approach is to read all of them.
Does a harder recovery cost more?
No, and this is where the flat rate does the most work for you.
A clicking drive that needs a full head swap in the cleanroom costs the same as a drive with a corrupted partition table, provided they’re the same capacity. Encryption is included, whether BitLocker, FileVault, LUKS, VeraCrypt or a factory self-encrypting drive. USB circuit board and enclosure work is included. There is no complexity surcharge of any kind.
Several surcharges that used to exist here were eliminated and are worth naming, because many labs still charge them: a $100 encryption fee, a $100 USB circuit board fee, a $100 over-2TB fee, a $200 over-8TB fee, and helium drive fees. None of those exist at $300 Data Recovery any more.
So what can make my total higher than the tier price?
Four things, all of them optional or stated up front.
- Donor parts, if your hard drive needs internal components such as heads. Billed at our cost with no markup. We tell you the exact price first and you decide before we order.
- A transfer drive to put your recovered data on, from $125 for 1TB. You can supply your own instead at no charge from us.
- Return shipping, $25 within the USA with signature confirmation and $100 insurance, or $20 without.
- Optional add-ons if you want them: Priority Service at $100 up front plus $200 on success, a clone of the original drive at $100, transfer drive encryption at $50.
A few situations carry a fee even if the recovery doesn’t succeed: a $100 open cover fee if the drive was opened before it reached us, credited toward your total; a $100 labor fee if we image the device successfully and find it empty or can’t decrypt it without your key; and the up-front portion of Priority Service. Those are all listed on our no data, no fee page.
Will the price change after you look at it?
Only if the device turns out to be a different size or type than described, and we tell you before proceeding.
The most common version is someone describing an external drive without knowing whether there’s a hard drive or an SSD inside. In that case we quote both possibilities up front: $300 if it’s a hard drive, $500 if it’s an SSD, confirmed once it arrives.
If a drive turns out to be smaller than you thought and lands in a cheaper tier, you pay the cheaper tier.