Rugby has always been a working town with an unusual amount of engineering in it. Cement from the works whose chimney you can see for miles, heavy electrical engineering along Boughton Road since the days of British Thomson-Houston, the school where the game started, and the enormous logistics estate that grew where the M1 and the A5 cross. The old radio station masts came down years ago and Houlton is being built across the land they stood on. What comes to the bench from CV21 to CV23 skews heavily towards business hardware.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Rugby. The written figure comes first and the work comes after it: £300 + VAT one disk or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or a stick, from £500 + VAT an array.
A firm of forty people usually has exactly one box that matters: a four-bay NAS in a comms cupboard, or a tower server with a mirrored pair or a RAID 5 set inside it. The moment a disk drops out, the box will offer to rebuild onto a replacement, and authorising that is the single most expensive click available. A rebuild reads every surviving member from end to end and writes as it goes, which is the heaviest load you can put on disks that are all the same age as the one that just died. Power the unit down instead. Photograph the front of the chassis, mark each disk with the bay it came out of, and send the member disks alone — not the case, not the controller, not the rails. Every disk is imaged separately before anything is assembled in software, so the originals are never gambled on a live rebuild. Array work opens at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count.
The engineering side of the town fails in a different way. Design and simulation machines run fast NVMe modules, and flash gives no warning at all — no click, no gradual slowing, just a module that was in the boot list on Friday and is not there on Monday. Sometimes that is the controller with the cells behind it intact, which is a good job, and sometimes it is the cells, which is not. The examination separates the two before anything is quoted, and an NVMe module is £300 + VAT exactly like a spinning disk.
Striped sets turn up here more than anywhere else in the network, usually as scratch volumes on workstations where somebody wanted the speed and did not read the rest of the sentence. RAID 0 has no redundancy of any kind: the data is cut into blocks and laid alternately across the members, so half a file or two thirds of a file lives on each disk and losing one member takes the whole volume with it. It is still recoverable work in most cases — the surviving members are imaged, the failed one is dealt with as an ordinary drive fault, and the stripe order and block size are worked out from the copies. What it is not is a job to attempt twice. Do not let a controller re-initialise the set, and send every member, including the dead one. Striped sets are quoted from £500 + VAT.
Out at the eastern edge the town runs on logistics — the freight terminal on the A5 by the motorway junction, the distribution sheds around it, and the transport offices that feed them. Warehouse management databases, proof-of-delivery archives, telematics exports and yard CCTV are the usual contents, and the recurring fault is not dramatic: a mirrored pair where one disk failed quietly months ago, nobody looked at the amber light, and the survivor has now gone too. If a set has dropped a member, take the power off and leave it off until somebody who images disks has seen it.
Households and the schools around the town send ordinary work as well, and it is priced identically: no premium for a business, no discount for a family. A pupil's laptop with coursework on it, a bursar's office machine, a rowing club's photograph archive on an external drive. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT and a card or memory stick £250 + VAT.
There is no counter in Rugby, nothing in Coventry, and no collection round. The laboratory is Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, which is about sixty miles away — either down the A423 through Southam and Banbury, or round by the M40 if you prefer the motorway. Insured, tracked post gets a parcel there overnight from any post office in the town; a courier account of your own does the same job; and the reception will take devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Put a sheet in the box with your name, a number that gets answered and a line on how the trouble started.
Prices do not vary with the postcode or the urgency. Arrays, NAS units and servers from £500 + VAT depending on member count; £400 + VAT for an encrypted disk or a recorder drive; £300 + VAT for any single drive or SSD; £250 + VAT for a card or a stick; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation with a full written report, or £400 + VAT for a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report. Ransomware is billed on the hardware it landed on rather than as investigation work, so it is £300 + VAT for one drive and from £500 + VAT for an array. The diagnostic is free and closes two working days after booking-in. Urgent business jobs go to the front of the bench queue at no extra charge. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.
Looking is free, one disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or a stick is £250 + VAT.