What external hard drive recovery costs. In sentences, because a table would imply more certainty than a sealed drive allows.

One drive is one price. It makes no difference whether the drive is a 500GB portable from 2012 or an 8TB desktop unit from last year, whether the badge says Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba or a name you had never heard of until it failed, or whether it arrives clicking, beeping, silent or asking to be formatted: £300 + VAT, after a free look, with the figure in writing before any chargeable work. A dead adaptor and a head swap cost the same, because the easy jobs pay for the hard ones and a flat figure is the only kind you can plan around from the desk.

Two or more drives that made up one volume are a set, and a set starts at £500 + VAT. That covers a two-bay LaCie or My Book Duo, a Rugged RAID, a StudioRAID, and a Drobo with two to four disks. The figure rises with the number of members and with what has been done to the set before it arrives; a rebuild that ran after a second failure is more work than a set that was simply powered down.

Larger arrays — a Pegasus R6 or R8, a ThunderBay 8, a G-RAID Shuttle, a five- or eight-bay Drobo — start at £1,250 + VAT. Priority handling, where the drive goes to the front of the bench, is quoted separately and only when you ask for it. VAT is added to every figure at the standard rate.

Nothing, for a single drive. A head swap, a board repair, a firmware unlock, a WD key recovered from a failed board and a shingled drive imaged over four nights all sit inside the one figure. What we tell you before you agree is how much we expect to come back, which is a different thing from what it costs.

Multi-drive sets are priced by how many members there are and whether a rebuild has already been attempted. A drive another laboratory has already opened, or a drive that has been opened, tapped, frozen or board-swapped at home, sits outside the no data, no bill promise, and you are told that at the outset. Encrypted volumes add a step once the drive is imaged, but not usually cost, provided you have the key.

Logging, photographs and a read-only diagnosis on our own equipment. A drive that clicks or beeps is not powered again; one that spins is read on the bench and never in a computer. We identify the drive inside, the board in front of it, the fault, and how much can honestly be read back. You then get an account of what we found, what we expect to recover, and one price. If you say no, the drive comes back to you at our expense, and nothing is owed.

Recovery software has its place: a healthy drive that sounds normal, reads at normal speed, and has deleted files or a lost partition, with the software run from another drive and never installed on the one being recovered. Used that way, it works. It cannot see a drive the computer cannot see, it cannot lift stuck heads or repair a board, and on a drive with weak heads every scan is thousands of extra reads of the weakest surface. A clicking drive scanned overnight is a drive with a ring in the platter by morning.

The makers' own offers are worth knowing about too. Seagate bundles a Rescue plan with many drives, which is already paid for if it is still valid; it takes up to thirty business days and keeps the original drive. Western Digital offers no recovery of its own, wipes any drive returned under warranty, and keeps the warranty alive after a laboratory recovery confirmed in writing, which we provide as standard. The cheap option is fine when the drive is well. When it is not, it is often the last thing anyone gets to try, and the free look is where you find out which yours is.