We take on more high-end work than the businesses around us, and that comes with limits worth stating plainly. Some of it is a deliberate boundary: component-level board work such as chip reballing and BGA reworks is a different trade entirely, and we would rather point you to someone who does it than pretend.
More of it is equipment, and that is easier to show than explain. A hard drive that will not mount is a tiered problem, and the tiers cannot be skipped. A shop gets equipped for them in order, and the money is cumulative — to be able to accept a job at the fourth tier, you have to have been running the first three the whole time.
Equipment cost
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1
Drive reads, will not mount
Plain image copy. Any shop with a dock and a cable can do this.
$100
equipment so far · $100
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2
Logical or file system corruption
Carving and file reconstruction on professional imaging hardware.
This is the tier we’re set up for
$2,500 – $5,000
equipment so far · $2,600 – $5,100
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3
Firmware-level failure
Needs an ACE Lab PC-3000 and a matching donor board.
$10,000 – $15,000
equipment so far · $12,600 – $20,100
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4
Mechanical failure
Head or motor replacement on a laminar flow bench.
$5,000 – $10,000
equipment so far · $17,600 – $30,100
Those figures are what it costs a shop to equip itself, not a price quote — nobody is billed for our tooling. Being able to say no to a job is rarely about skill. By the fourth tier you are looking at roughly $18,000 to $30,000 in equipment before bench space, staff time, or a single part. Most of the shops around us are still on row one. We’re on row two — and rows three and four are not ours.
Until we can do a job ourselves, the honest answer will be a referral to a mail-in lab. We keep adding equipment and training staff against the jobs we actually turn away, and every service that comes in house is one that stops leaving the city.
Worth knowing when we send you out the door: we don’t refer to labs that overcharge, or that hand us a kickback for the referral. We point you at places we have no business relationship with — no contract, no referral fee, no kickback, nothing coming back to us. That is deliberate. It means there is no financial reason for us to send you anywhere except to someone we know does the work properly.
