Pricing Guide

(a) Interface

The disk could be IDE, SATA or SCSI, ranging from a few gigabytes (GB) to a few terabytes (TB) from different manufacturers.

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

(b) Size

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.

(c) Model

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

• Typically, for a disk capacity of less than 2 TB, the price may range from $200 (file system corruption) to thousand odd dollars (with physical failure). The charge may be higher if the job complexity increases.
• As such, it is not possible to publish a standard price list due to the number of cost factors involved (see above) 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.
• See the types of service level to choose from.

Will it be cheaper if I want less data?

• If you are the home users, students or others who do not use the data for business purpose or profit, ADRC offers special pricing on case by case basis. You have to bring the disk to our office in person so we could qualify if you are eligible for such pricing. Please contact our office if you need further clarification.

• 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$90 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 evaluated to be 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.