Hard drive problems are pretty common nowadays, particularly with the popularity of not only laptops, but external hard drives. Because of the portability of these particular devices, and the fact that we are all subject to human error of some kind, we receive a number of crashed hard drives each day. Many of our clients are looking for some kind of data recovery online, but typically do not know exactly what they are looking for because of the fact that they are not sure of what their specific hard drive problem is.

This is no big deal, of course, as we have almost seen it all when it comes to hard drive problems, and can typically diagnose yours within five minutes or less. We a€™re not trying to say that we are the Domino’s Pizza of the hard drive recovery industry (our services taste much better), but suffice it to say that even if you assume that you have a rather rare hard drive problem, we have probably seen it before.

Cheapest Data Recovery?

Even as a well recognized price leader in the hard drive recovery industry, you would actually be quite surprised by the number of conversations we have with our data recovery customers about prices. Naturally, no one ever wants to overpay for a data recovery service, but people are typically very price sensitive to hard drive recovery services. This likely has a lot to do with not only the fact that the cost for a blank hard drive is actually quite cheap nowadays, but also due to the fact that many competitors offer something we call the “$99 Fakeout”€.

$99 For Real? Uh, Nope.

To those looking for the cheapest data recovery solution for their hard drive problems, we always say this: the data recovery industry works on a “you get what you pay for”€-basis. By this we mean that there will always be companies out there offering $99 data recovery, but what the uninitiated do not typically understand is that these companies will typically charge you whether or not they recover your data at all. In fact, no matter what your hard drive problems are, they will typically be extremely anxious to have you send their hard drive to them.

These $99 companies typically make their money with what they may call “€œdiagnosis fees”€. And, in many cases they can simply have a customer ship a hard drive to them, plug it into a simple data recovery software system to see if they can be fixed, and then if it cannot be fixed via software means, simply send it back.

Many of our data recovery clients come to us with a broken hard drive that they say was returned to them by another provider claiming that “there would be no way the data could be recovered.” Of course, what those “€œcheapest data recovery”€ providers typically mean to say is that they do not have a clean room, and as a result can not actually provide professional hard drive recovery services.

The truth is that there are a lot more of these companies out there than you would imagine. So whenever somebody says that you can’t recover your hard drive, it is always better to get a second opinion.

Believe us. Almost 10% of our business comes from people with hard drive problems that have taken these cheapest data recovery€ offers and have discovered that their “drives are unrecoverable”€.

This is rarely the actual case.

Contact us here for help.