NAS Data Recovery Cost
Real numbers, in the first screen, not a callback form. NAS data recovery is billed two ways: a per-member imaging fee for each drive in the array, set by that drive's failure mode, plus one array reconstruction fee to virtually rebuild the mdadm, LVM, ZFS, or Btrfs geometry from the clones. Free evaluation. No data = no charge.
How Much Does NAS Data Recovery Cost?
NAS data recovery is billed in two parts: a per-member imaging fee for every drive in the array, and a single array reconstruction fee for the array as a whole. The imaging fee is set by each drive's own failure mode and scales with the number of drives. The reconstruction fee covers virtually rebuilding the array geometry from the clones. There is no diagnostic fee, and if we cannot recover your data, you pay nothing.
- Per-member imaging fee
- The cost to clone one drive in your array sector by sector through a hardware write-blocker before any reconstruction begins. It is priced by that single drive's failure mode, not by the array, and it repeats for each drive that needs imaging. A healthy drive that just needs cloning sits at $100; a drive with filesystem corruption is From $250; firmware repair is $600–$900; a mechanical head swap is $1,200–$1,500 plus donor cost; platter damage is $2,000.
- Array reconstruction fee
- One fee of $400-$800 per array, charged once, for the engineering work of virtually reassembling the array from the write-blocked clones. This is reading mdadm superblocks for the coherent event count, activating the LVM volume group with
vgchange -ay, and mounting the Btrfs or ext4 filesystem read-only, or importing a ZFS pool on TrueNAS. It does not repeat per drive.
A worked logical recovery makes the model concrete. A four-bay Synology or QNAP where every drive is physically healthy but the array won't mount after a power loss generates four imaging line items at the From $250 filesystem tier, plus the single $400-$800 array reconstruction fee. If one of those four members is clicking and needs a head swap, that one member's line item moves up to $1,200–$1,500 plus donor cost while the other three stay at the lower tier.
What Are the Per-Member Imaging Tiers and the Reconstruction Fee?
Every imaging fee below is per drive. Add one of these per member in your array, set by that member's failure mode, then add the single array reconstruction fee once. The tiers are the same published HDD recovery tiers we use sitewide; a NAS is a set of drives plus reconstruction labor, not a separate price list.
| Fee | What it covers | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Imaging: Simple Copy | Healthy drive, cloned sector by sector through a write-blocker | Per member drive | $100 |
| Imaging: File System | Drive not recognized, no unusual sounds; logical or filesystem damage | Per member drive | From $250 |
| Imaging: Firmware | Drive inaccessible or reports wrong size; ROM or translator repair | Per member drive | $600–$900 |
| Imaging: Head Swap | Clicking, beeping, or won't spin; donor head transplant on a clean bench | Per member drive, plus donor cost | $1,200–$1,500 |
| Imaging: Surface / Platter | Dropped or scored platters; platter cleaning and head swap | Per member drive, plus donor cost | $2,000 |
| Array Reconstruction | Virtual reassembly of mdadm, LVM, ZFS, Btrfs, ext4, XFS, or BeyondRAID geometry | Once per array | $400-$800 |
| Helium member drive | Sealed 8TB+ enterprise drive; refill required after a head swap | Per member drive, separate tier | $200–$5,000+ |
Helium-sealed enterprise drives in an eight-bay or twelve-bay chassis (Toshiba MG, Seagate Exos, WD Ultrastar) are quoted on the separate helium tier starting at From $200, because a head swap on a helium drive requires a refill after opening the chamber. Donor drives are matching drives used for parts. Typical donor cost: $50–$150 for common drives, $200–$400 for rare or high-capacity models. We source the cheapest compatible donor available.
Reading the table: total = (imaging fee for each member, summed across the array) + (one array reconstruction fee). A rush option is available: +$100 rush fee to move to the front of the queue.
What Does Imaging a Single Member Drive Cost?
Each member drive in your NAS is priced as an individual recovery, by its own failure mode. These are the published tiers in full. Multiply the relevant tier by the number of drives that need imaging, then add the $400-$800 array reconstruction fee once.
- Low complexity
Simple Copy
Your drive works, you just need the data moved off it
Functional drive; data transfer to new media
Rush available: +$100
$100
3-5 business days
- Low complexity
File System Recovery
Your drive isn't recognized by your computer, but it's not making unusual sounds
File system corruption. Accessible with professional recovery software but not by the OS
Starting price; final depends on complexity
From $250
2-4 weeks
- Medium complexity
Firmware Repair
Your drive is completely inaccessible. It may be detected but shows the wrong size or won't respond
Firmware corruption: ROM, modules, or translator tables corrupted; requires PC-3000 terminal access
CMR drive: $600. SMR drive: $900.
$600–$900
3-6 weeks
- High complexity
Most Common
Head Swap
Your drive is clicking, beeping, or won't spin. The internal read/write heads have failed
Head stack assembly failure. Transplanting heads from a matching donor drive on a clean bench
50% deposit required. CMR: $1,200-$1,500 + donor. SMR: $1,500 + donor.
50% deposit required
$1,200–$1,500
4-8 weeks
- High complexity
Surface / Platter Damage
Your drive was dropped, has visible damage, or a head crash scraped the platters
Platter scoring or contamination. Requires platter cleaning and head swap
50% deposit required. Donor parts are consumed in the repair. Most difficult recovery type.
50% deposit required
$2,000
4-8 weeks
Hardware Repair vs. Software Locks
Our "no data, no fee" policy applies to hardware recovery. We do not bill for unsuccessful physical repairs. If we replace a hard drive read/write head assembly or repair a liquid-damaged logic board to a bootable state, the hardware repair is complete and standard rates apply. If data remains inaccessible due to user-configured software locks, a forgotten passcode, or a remote wipe command, the physical repair is still billable. We cannot bypass user encryption or activation locks.
No data, no fee. Free evaluation and firm quote before any paid work. Full guarantee details. Head swap and surface damage require a 50% deposit because donor parts are consumed in the attempt.
- Rush fee
- +$100 rush fee to move to the front of the queue
- Donor drives
- Donor drives are matching drives used for parts. Typical donor cost: $50–$150 for common drives, $200–$400 for rare or high-capacity models. We source the cheapest compatible donor available.
- Target drive
- The destination drive we copy recovered data onto. You can supply your own or we provide one at cost plus a small markup. For larger capacities (8TB, 10TB, 16TB and above), target drives cost $400+ extra. All prices are plus applicable tax.
Helium-sealed drives (8TB and larger NAS or server drives such as Toshiba MG08, Seagate Exos, and WD Ultrastar) are quoted on a separate tier. See helium drive pricing.
Why Is NAS Recovery Priced Per Drive Plus a Reconstruction Fee?
A NAS is not one device; it is several drives bound together by software. The work splits cleanly into two stages, so the price does too.
First every member is cloned sector by sector through a hardware write-blocker, which is per-drive labor. Then engineers virtually rebuild the array from those clones, which is per-array labor. Pricing each stage separately is the honest way to bill it, because a four-drive array genuinely has twice the imaging work of a two-drive array but the same reconstruction work.
Stage one: image every member
We never reconstruct from the original drives. Each member is cloned with ddrescue, DeepSpar Disk Imager, or a PC-3000 Portable III through a hardware write-blocker, so nothing we do can write to your originals. A drive that clones cleanly is cheap; a drive that needs firmware repair or a head swap to be read at all costs more. That is why the imaging fee is set per drive by failure mode.
This is also why a degraded array must be imaged before any rebuild. Rebuilding on the live drives risks finishing off an already-marginal member under sustained read load.
Stage two: reconstruct the array
With every member imaged, engineers reassemble the array virtually from the clones: identify the coherent mdadm superblocks by event count, activate the LVM volume group, and mount the Btrfs or ext4 filesystem read-only, or import the ZFS pool. For a Drobo, this stage means parsing the proprietary BeyondRAID layout from the raw images instead.
This is one fee per array because it happens once, no matter how many drives feed into it. Closed formats and torn metadata add labor here; an open mdadm stack with clean metadata is the floor.
RAID is not a backup. Parity protects against one drive dying, not against ransomware, an accidental delete, or the metadata corruption that throws a Volume Crashed banner. If you are reading this because the array already failed, that is the lesson to carry forward: keep a separate, offline copy of anything you cannot lose.
What Makes One NAS Recovery Cost More Than Another?
Four things move the total: how many drives you have, what failed on each drive, how the array level degraded, and how layered the filesystem stack is. None of them is the brand name on the chassis. A Synology and a QNAP of the same bay count, both running Linux mdadm and LVM, sit in the same cost band; the difference is what is wrong with the drives inside.
- Member drive count
- The imaging fee repeats per drive. Two bays, two imaging line items; eight bays, eight. A larger array also raises the odds that at least one member has a mechanical fault that lands at the head-swap tier instead of a simple clone.
- RAID level and degradation (URE math)
- Consumer drives carry a worst-case spec of one unrecoverable read error per 10^14 bits, roughly 12.5 TB read. Rebuilding a 48 TB RAID 5 array reads past that floor, so the marketing line that you just swap the failed drive and press repair is the one to distrust. A degraded array has to be imaged member by member before any rebuild, because a read error on a surviving member during a live rebuild can collapse the whole array. That extra forensic care is reconstruction labor.
- Filesystem layering
- A Synology or QNAP stacks mdadm under LVM under Btrfs or ext4, so a single failure can land at any of three layers and each has to be repaired in order. Btrfs adds its own trap: it never overwrites a block in place, so running
btrfs check --repaircan shred the historical tree roots that recovery depends on. Read-only extraction withbtrfs restoreavoids that, but careful work on a layered stack costs more than a flat filesystem. - SMR timeout ejection
- Shingled Magnetic Recording drives pretend to be standard drives but stall for 30 to 60 seconds during sustained writes while their internal cache zones drain. The NAS reads that pause as a dead drive and ejects a physically healthy member, which can crash an already-degraded array. Untangling an SMR-induced ejection adds reconstruction labor, and an SMR drive that needs firmware or head work also images at a higher tier.
- Closed-format reconstruction
- A Drobo BeyondRAID array, or a ZFS pool whose deduplication table outgrew RAM, costs more at the reconstruction stage. BeyondRAID is genuinely proprietary and has to be parsed forensically; a ZFS dedup pool that needs about 5GB of RAM per 1TB of unique data hangs on import and requires transaction-group rollback. Both are more labor than an open mdadm stack with clean metadata.
The cheapest recovery is the one you don't make harder. Do not let the NAS rebuild onto a fresh drive, do not accept any prompt to initialize or reformat, and do not move the drives to a new enclosure and click Migrate. Each can overwrite the mdadm superblocks or the filesystem tree and turn a clean logical recovery into a much costlier reconstruction.
What Do We Publish Up Front on NAS Recovery Cost?
We publish the imaging tiers and the array reconstruction fee directly on this page, charge no diagnostic fee, and put you in direct contact with the technician doing the work. The firm quote you get after imaging is bounded by these published tiers, so there is no surprise number at the end.
| Question you have | What we publish |
|---|---|
| What does it cost? | Five imaging tiers plus the array reconstruction fee, listed above |
| Is there a diagnostic fee? | No diagnostic fee, no evaluation fee |
| Who works on my drives? | The technician doing the recovery, in-house |
| Where is the work done? | One lab in Austin, TX; no outsourcing, no satellite offices |
| What if it fails? | No data, no charge; you define a successful recovery up front |
NAS failure modes are knowable, so the cost is knowable: a healthy drive clones, a clicking drive needs a head swap, an mdadm array reassembles, a BeyondRAID array gets parsed. We price each of those and publish it.
How Does a NAS Recovery Actually Run?
Nationwide service is mail-in, and all work is performed in-house at our lab at 2410 San Antonio Street, Austin, TX 78705. You power the unit down, pull the drives, label each one by bay position, and ship them. We image first and reconstruct second, so the price you are quoted maps directly to the two-fee model on this page.
- 01Label and ship. Power down, remove each drive, mark its bay position, and mail the drives to the Austin lab. Bay order matters for reconstruction, so do not shuffle them.
- 02Image every member. Each drive is cloned sector by sector with
ddrescueor a PC-3000 Portable III through a hardware write-blocker before anything else. This sets each drive's imaging tier. - 03Firm quote, then you decide. Once we know each drive's failure mode, you get a quote bounded by the published tiers plus the single $400-$800 reconstruction fee. No diagnostic fee to get here.
- 04Reconstruct from clones. Engineers reassemble the array virtually from the write-blocked images, read the data off, and copy it to your target drive. If we cannot recover it, you pay nothing.
Data Recovery Standards & Verification
Our Austin lab operates on a transparency-first model. We use industry-standard recovery tools, including PC-3000 and DeepSpar, combined with strict environmental controls to maintain drive integrity. This approach allows us to serve clients nationwide with consistent technical standards.
Open-drive work is performed in a ULPA-filtered laminar-flow bench, validated to 0.02 µm particle count, verified using TSI P-Trak instrumentation.
Transparent History
Serving clients nationwide via mail-in service since 2008. Our lead engineer holds PC-3000 and HEX Akademia certifications for hard drive firmware repair and mechanical recovery.
Media Coverage
Our repair work has been covered by The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider, with CBC News reporting on our pricing transparency. Louis Rossmann has testified in Right to Repair hearings in multiple states and founded the Repair Preservation Group.
Aligned Incentives
Our "No Data, No Charge" policy means we assume the risk of the recovery attempt, not the client.
Technical Oversight
Louis Rossmann
Our engineers review all lab protocols to maintain technical accuracy and honest service. Since 2008, his focus has been on clear technical communication and accurate diagnostics rather than sales-driven explanations.
We believe in proving standards rather than just stating them. We use TSI P-Trak instrumentation to verify that clean-air benchmarks are met before any drive is opened.
See our clean bench validation data and particle test videoNAS Data Recovery Cost Questions
How much does NAS data recovery cost?
Is there a diagnostic fee?
What is the per-member imaging fee?
What is the array reconstruction fee?
Why does a 4-bay NAS cost more than a 2-bay?
Do you charge if you can't recover the data?
Why do you publish NAS recovery prices directly on the site?
Does a Synology cost more to recover than a QNAP?
Why does Drobo recovery cost more than Synology or QNAP?
Is Unraid cheaper to recover because it isn't striped?
What drives up the cost on a TrueNAS or FreeNAS ZFS pool?
My NAS uses 16TB helium drives. Does that change the price?
Is there a rush option, and what does it cost?
What should I avoid doing to keep the cost down?
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Get a firm NAS recovery quote
Ship your labeled drives. We image first, quote against the published tiers, and recover from clones. No diagnostic fee. No data, no charge.