We take on more high-end work than the businesses around us, and that comes with limits worth stating plainly. Saying no to a job is rarely about skill. The equipment for advanced work like data recovery and component-level motherboard repair climbs in cost the deeper the job goes. That’s the direction we’re growing in — we add equipment and train against the jobs we currently turn away.
Data recovery from a hard drive is a good example. It’s a tiered process where each level of severity requires more specialized equipment than the last.
Cost to equip for this tier
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1
Drive is fine, something else failed
Plain image copy, usually the computer or external enclosure that gave out. Any shop with a dock and a cable can do this.
equipment
$100
equipment so far · $100
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2
Logical or file system corruption
Not readable by the operating system. Drives stabilized with DeepSpar hardware, then imaged and recovered with R-Studio.
This is the tier we’re set up for
equipment
$2,500 – $5,000
equipment so far · $2,600 – $5,100
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3
Firmware-level failure
Your drive may be detected but report the wrong size, or not show up in the operating system at all. Fixing it needs an ACE Lab PC-3000 and a matching donor board.
equipment
$10,000 – $15,000
equipment so far · $12,600 – $20,100
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4
Mechanical failure
Loud clicking or grinding. Fixing it means component work on a laminar flow bench to avoid contaminating the platters.
equipment
$5,000 – $10,000
equipment so far · $17,600 – $30,100
Most of the shops around us are still on row one. We’re on row two.
The tiers are cumulative — if a shop swaps the platters on a drive (tier 4), the drive has to be stabilized with DeepSpar hardware (tier 2) or matched with firmware adjustments on the AceLab PC-3000 (tier 3), and without that equipment there is a fair chance no data comes off at all. Other stores are going to be hesitant to take on a drive that has already been physically opened (attempted tier 4), as they have no idea what was done to it.
Until we can do a job ourselves, the honest answer will be a referral to a mail-in lab. 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, and it means there is no financial reason for us to send you anywhere except to someone we know does the work properly.
