Not to make excuses, BUT that article was written by our engineer Malcolm who is from New Zealand. I will go through and correct the grammar and you are right I should have done that from the get go.

On to your question. Maxtor is owned by Seagate which in turn owns ActionFront Data Recovery. That purchase raised a lot of blood pressures in the industry since it seams unfair to sell someone a drive, then when it fails charge them $1500 – $3500 to recover the data! That being said, ActionFront is a good company from a success standpoint. If they were unable to recover the data for under $1000, more than likely it needed clean room work. They do have high prices to be sure, twice as much as us in fact, but they have a huge overhead and get their money back from people like you.

There is a lot more going on then just a burnt chip, especially when it comes to SATA drives. A surge to the System Area or Firmware area as it is sometimes called creates problems to all aspects of how the drive interacts with your computer. If it isn’t recognized by the BIOS then the SMART and defect tables are corrupted. These problems happen in just about every surge case that hits the door here. Since drive manufacturers are tight-lipped about the system area, data recovery companies have to hack the drive and often times re-write the system area. While you might be technically proficient enough to swap a chip, there is no way you will be able to access the system area or repair it without the type of equipment that we have.

The grammar and punctuation is off, which (call me picky) always turns me off from any professional service that can’t professionally express themselves.

Bottom line: This article says NEVER NEVER do-it-yourself when it comes to hard-disc drives. Just like countless others on the web, and most of those are promoting their own data recover outfits.

Here’s my situation and see if you see why someone would STILL try to do-it-themselves.

I have a 250GB SATA Maxtor MaxLine Plus II that died on me. A bad PSU kill it and two dvdROM drives. Lets say we forget what I paid for the 250GB Maxtor almost 3 years ago (when they were the cream of the crop). On the drive is about 10K pictures from years of amateur photography, and maybe 3 times that in mp3s. Point being; there’s nothing I can’t live without but it sure was sentimental to me. Now lets look at the numbers:

Oct 2007 prices
250Gb Sata HD $70
this drive is still under warantee and Maxtor will recover my data and send it to me on a new/refurbished drive. The replacement warantee drive is of course free but the data recovery part would be at least $1500. (2006 est given over the phone).
To me that’s INSANE. Lets say we say they would do it for HALF price. For $750 I could buy THREE 1TB (1000GB) SATA drives and have enough left to buy a new 250GB SATA.
If I sent the drive in and they said; Sorry sir we couldn’t recover anything at all, please take these FOUR drives for a total of 3250GB for your troubles and thanks for choosing Maxtor… Let’s just said it would be a GROSS understatement to say I’d be “Happy”.

So finally, I want to see if I can replace a burnt chip on the controller board under the HDDA. If I fail all I’d did is voided the warantee and further lost a lost drive. If I succeed I will likely have a working 250GB SATA drive for the forseeable future and have all of my pics and music back.

Am I crazy or foolish for thinking this way? If it was a drive that had business critical stuff for work or my company I would surely swallow that huge cost of recovery. But I don’t and I won’t.

Ps: prices for HDD referenced from http://www.pricewatch.com. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.

Thanks for reading.