Pricing Guide

We feel that it is important for customers to have a feel of our data recovery pricing before they send their disks to us. We do not hide any hidden costs whatsoever and all costs will be made known up front even before evaluation.

Upon evaluation, a quote will be generated and sent to the customers for confirmation before any work is done.

Recovery charges are based on the job complexities which are related to:

Types of disk (interface, model and size)
Failure modes
Types of operating system
User attempts before sending
Any special user 's requirements

1

Types of Hard disk

The disk could be IDE, SATA or SCSI, ranging from a few GB to near TB from different manufacturers.

For instance, it is a well known fact that SCSI disk is harder to recover than IDE disk.

It is also more difficult to recover data from a larger disk capacity as the magnetic density, the number of read write heads and the level of technological complexity increase with disk capacity.

It is also not surprise that certain disk models are extremely difficult to service due to the manufacturing technology, material and methodology.

2

Failure Modes

Hard disk may fail logically or physically. In general, it is harder to service a physically damaged disk and hence the cost of recovery will be higher.

How to differentiate between physical or logical failure of data media?

3

Operating System

The operating system are many and varied. Recovering data from a UNIX file system will be more difficult and costly than from a Windows operating System. Some recovery may even involve "legacy" system and may need to be treated as a special project.

4

User's Attempts

Unsound attempts by the users to rescue the data very often cause the data media to suffer more damages. Very often, in order to recover data from damaged media, earlier user's action has to be reversed and this may add additional costs as a result.

5

Special User's Requirement

Some recovery jobs may have special requirements. For instance, the disk could be from a special machine and therefore one may need to recover the booting operating system besides the data. In other instance, besides the normal disk failure, the customer may have special encrypted file system so recovering data from it could be a challenge.

In general, the pricing does not depend on the amount of data recovered. It depends on job complexity as outline above. Special User's Requirement

Rough Gauge

As a rough gauge, for a 20 GB – 40 GB hard disk, it is damaged logically, the price can range from a minimum of $200 to about $800. In the case of physical damage, it may range from S$900 to S$2000.

Will it be cheaper if I want less data?

In the case when the disk capacity is larger (as modern disks can reach 1 TB in size !) and job complexities get higher, the charge could be more. It is not possible to publish a standard price list due to the number of cost factors involved and the changing technology that is progressing by leaps and bounds.

However, if you need to have a better gauge of pricing, during your submission of data media to our lab, our engineers could discuss with you the problem and follow up by a quick physical inspection to quote you a Not-To-Exceed (NTE) price. In that case, you will know where your maximum price cap is. Exact pricing will be quoted after detailed evaluation and will not exceed the NTE pricing.

No Evaluation Fee

ADRC DOES NOT charge fixed evaluation fee. Under any circumstances if the recovery is not successful, there will be no lab fee charge at all.

Upon evaluation and quotation, if the customer decides not to proceed with the job, we do charge a cancellation fee of S$50 per standard hard disk recovery job. This cancellation fee should not be taken as evaluation fee because the customer does not pay anything if the job is unrecoverable. If this is the evaluation fee, customer must then pay this fixed amount after evaluation regardless of outcome. The idea of charging the cancellation fee is to discourage those who are not genuine in pursuing the data recovery process with us.

Further, customers would have known our price range or price cap before hand so we will not arbitrarily raise the price in order to force the customer to cancel the job to reap the cancellation fee, the cost of which is really trivial to us.

We provide three level of service level to cater to different customers' needs. They are Standard Service, Priority Evaluation and Express Service.

If you are home user, student or non-profit organization, ADRC could assist by providing some special pricing.