I just got a call the other day. The perspective client was distraught over the loss of their data. He had already sent his hard drive to a lab (which I never heard of). The diagnosis was a bent actuator arm, and would cost $1,300.00 to recover the data.
Frankly I have never heard of a bent actuator arm not causing total destruction of the platters and making recovery impossible.
I asked why he did not go through with the recovery since they had the drive in a clean room and were ready to recover his data. Stone silence... "Well, because it is so expensive!", he said. Clean rooms and the equipment they contain are extremely expensive. Drive Savers just spent 11 Million dollars (Visions of Dr. Evil here... "Million Dollars") to upgrade their lab.
Conclusion: Get a Western Digital Passport 750Gb hard drives and a little program called 2nd Copy by Centered Systems and be safe. The drives can be purchased at Costco for ~$100.00 and 2nd copy is downloadable for ~$30.00. If you don't do proper backups, plan on spending about $1,500.00 to $2,500.00 to recover data from your single hard drive!

Tags: Hard Drive Crash, Data Recovery Service, Data Recovery Lab, Data Backups