Hence, if the necessity arises to open your in-warranty drive, the manufacturer will honor the warranty. Be warned, however, that the price you pay for this privilege usually exceeds the replacement cost of the drive so don't be overly influenced by this factor. You will often find much more reasonable pricing from among the many smaller data recovery centers than you will from the larger national, albeit more well-known, ones. In all but the most difficult of scenarios, the smaller companies offer similar capabilities to the larger. You may lose a couple of extra days in the process but you will usually save quite a bit of money following this route.
Data recovery is a mixture of science and art.
Luck frequently comes into play more than any of us in the business would like to admit. And, of course, there's the flip side of that coin, where a drive which appears perfectly sound will resist all efforts to pull any meaningful data from it. The prices may sometimes seem high but a lot of work goes into the effort with no advance assurances of success. It varies not so much from company to company but by how you massage the statistics. Every data recovery scenario is slightly different from one another, and the same procedures which may have resulted in success in one case may not produce those results in another.