Looking for hard drive recovery under $500.

Ouch, I feel your pain mate. You most likely won't be able to find a local recovery place for under 5 bills anywhere in Toronto or GTA though. A few years back I had a similar situation and I ended up paying around 900 for recovering a buzzing drive at Fyksis if I am not mistaken. They turned out to be the cheapest of all the quotes I received, but they did charge me upfront for the parts, which was a little sketchy, but eventually turned out great. I heard of a guy operating from Windsor and doing recoveries at a very low price, but I cannot be certain, so I would do some background checks before committing to him I think he calls himself datarecoveryguy. My wife recently had her compact flash with some work raw images go kayak and she got it recovered for about 600 at Aesonlabs, but this was a flash card, not a hard drive so I cannot be sure about their other prices.

Anyway, hope this was helpful and hope you get your project files back mate.

I would like to know too. If it was the PCB, I would direct you to https://www.onepcbsolution.com/ , but if it's clicking, then it is probably not the PCB.

Don’t know what is local to you, but try Memofix.

I came across this pretty cool video from Linus Tech Tips just recently. I've never seen a better explanation of just what it is a data recovery company might do instead of talking about voodoo clean rooms and astronomical prices. (Even then, it's still not a great explanation, but it's something.)


Seems there's an Ottawa-based company that sells the gadget the professionals use – and it only costs $2000. That's a price actual humans could afford!

Does this mean decently-priced data recovery could actually be in the future? Maybe someone here has actually tried someone?

I am very sorry to hear about your situation...I had an experience with CBL Data Recovery that I used about 14 yrs. ago where they charged $1750 to recover data from my WD 120GB HD...