I had a disk that failed that had personal pictures that were valuable enough to spend the required 350$ to recover the disk. While I was looking for someone t

I had a disk that failed that had personal pictures that were valuable enough to spend the required 350$ to recover the disk. While I was looking for someone to do the job, I have had the chance to talk with people that do this and ask them about the pricetag. There are 2 kinds of people that recover data from hard drives: - Companies that build and maintain a "white-room" or clean-room that respects a certain ISO standard about the size of the dust so that it won't harm the hardware. They employ highly qualified technicians, and most of their work is for other businesses not individuals. Their prices are high because the cost to maintain all that is high. The second category are freelancers (like the guy I ended-up using), they only have store fronts, they take disks from clients and when they have enough disks, they rent a "white-room" by the hour from one of the companies I talked about before. Their prices are a bit lower than the first ones, but they're still high because renting the white-room still costs a bit of money.