A failed drive should not come with an open-ended bill. The fault is diagnosed inside 48 hours at no charge, one figure goes in writing before anything is opened, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay if the files do not come back. Hard disks, SSDs, RAID sets, NAS units and memory cards — worked on Oxford Street, by the engineers who answer the phone.
$ mdr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: Seagate ST2000DM008 (2 TB) → Status: CLICKING — head stack failure → Client: confidential · Bolton $ mdr engineer-working → Donor PCB matched: 100A4544 rev D → Head-stack swap: complete → Imaging: 1.78 TB / 1.81 TB $ mdr verify → ✓ wedding_photos — 142,318 files → ✓ tax_records — 4,201 files → ✓ everything else — back home
Most laboratories quote once your drive is already sitting on their bench. Here is the tariff up front instead, so you can work out whether it is worth your while before you pack anything. Every figure is a flat fee excluding VAT, confirmed in writing at the diagnostic and unchanged afterwards — no percentage of the data, no hourly rate, no surcharge for a difficult afternoon.
One thing that is not on the list. Apple storage soldered to a logic board that no longer powers up — T2 and Apple Silicon machines — carries no price, because there is no method. The encryption key is fused into the security chip on that board and cannot be moved to another. You will hear that at the free diagnostic rather than after an invoice. More on Mac storage →
Written up from real work with the identifying details stripped out. The third one is here deliberately — a laboratory that only ever publishes its hundred-per-cents is telling you something about the rest of its week.
Routine maintenance, disks pulled and reseated, no note kept of which bay each came from. Not one member had actually failed — the controller simply could not assemble an array whose sequence had been lost. Twenty-four drives can be ordered roughly 620 billion trillion ways, so working through arrangements was never a plan, and each attempt on live hardware risks the controller writing fresh metadata over the evidence needed to solve it. The layout was derived from the data on read-only images instead, and the array assembled outside the box that lost it.
A portable that stopped being detected, opened up on the entirely reasonable assumption that a bare drive reads on any machine. On most brands it does. My Passport units encrypt by default whether or not a password was ever set, and the key material lives on the small USB bridge board inside the shell rather than on the platters — so the shell is the drive, and the plastic had already been thrown out. Recovery came through a matched bridge and a patient read past the damaged regions.
The card was electrically perfect — no controller fault, no bad blocks, nothing to repair — which made it the harder conversation rather than the easier one. Deleting a file only marks the space as free, and a quick format only rewrites the index, so both usually come back in full. Overwriting physically puts new data into the same cells, and nothing retrieves what was underneath. Cloned through a write blocker, then carved by signature: everything the new footage had not landed on came back at full resolution, and the rest was named rather than glossed over.
None of these help us sell anything. They are here because every one of them arrives by phone most weeks, and hearing the answer early saves somebody a wasted journey across town.
If the drive still mounts and your files still open, copy them onto something else this afternoon and keep your money. There is nothing a clean-air bench adds to a disk you can already read. Ring us and we will tell you exactly that, at no charge and with no attempt to talk you out of it.
Nobody breaks the current strains, and anyone claiming otherwise is either paying the ransom on your behalf or guessing. What genuinely recovers data is everything the encryption run missed — shadow copies it failed to clear, originals still sitting in free space, machines and volumes it never reached before it was stopped.
TRIM can have the controller erase those blocks within minutes, and once a block is genuinely erased no tool on earth recovers it. The identical deletion on a mechanical hard disk may sit there untouched for months. Which of the two you are holding decides whether this is worth starting, and we will say which before you commit.
One figure at diagnostic, in writing, before anything is opened. No percentage of what comes back, no hourly rate, nothing charged for looking, and on the majority of jobs no bill at all if the recovery fails. If the job turns out to be something other than we thought, you get a phone call rather than a larger invoice.
Nothing becomes chargeable until a figure has been agreed in writing, which happens at stage three. The two before it cost nothing and commit you to nothing at all.
Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN, weekdays 9am to 5:30pm — minutes from Oxford Road station and walkable from Piccadilly. Or send it insured from anywhere in the UK. A bare drive travels better than the machine around it.
Mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical. That single call sets the method, the price and the honest odds, so it is done properly rather than quickly. No charge, and no obligation to go further.
You see the number, the odds and what we expect to get back before a single screw comes out. Say no and the device goes home, at no cost. Nothing here moves without you.
Nothing is attempted on your original. It is read sector by sector to a fresh image and every rebuild happens on that, so no attempt we make can cost you what was still readable when it arrived.
Files are opened in the software that created them rather than counted in a list, and anything unreadable is named rather than buried. Returned on fresh storage with postage covered, your original alongside — or destroyed to certificate if you would rather.
Laptop disks and camera cards through to twenty-four-bay arrays out of a server room. Different hardware, same discipline — image it before you touch it, and work from the copy.
We work out of Peter House on Oxford Street, in the middle of town — a couple of minutes from Oxford Road station, a short walk from Piccadilly, and inside the M60 for anyone driving in. Everything is done at that address; nothing is forwarded to a partner laboratory somewhere else.
Across Greater Manchester that puts Salford, Stockport, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury and Wigan comfortably inside the hour. Past the county boundary we take work from Lancashire through Preston, Chorley, Blackburn and Burnley; Merseyside through Liverpool and the Wirral; and Cheshire through Warrington, Chester and Macclesfield.
Further out than that, insured post works perfectly well and we cover the return leg. Plenty of jobs on the bench in any given week arrived by courier rather than by hand. How postal recovery works →
If you have searched data recovery near me from somewhere in Greater Manchester, this is the local answer — a real address on Oxford Street with the work done on site, rather than a collection point that posts your drive to a laboratory two hundred miles away.
The same applies to the narrower searches. Hard drive recovery near me, SSD recovery, RAID recovery and memory card recovery all land in the same building and on the same bench. Data recovery near me →
Prices here start at £250 excluding VAT for logical and flash work and £300 for physical faults, with arrays from £500 and two flat rates for Fusion Drives and encrypted media. The full cost breakdown explains what moves a job between those bands.
Nobody should be quoting you a range that widens after they open the case. If a laboratory will not give you a fixed figure in writing before starting, ask why. FAQ and pricing →
A free written diagnostic inside 48 hours, one fixed figure before anything is opened, and on most jobs nothing to pay if it does not work. Two decades of it, from an address you can walk to.