My external hard drive is not working and I took it to ...?

Question

Best Buy and That's where I bought it. They said they could not get it to recognize it either and they could send it out to a Data Recovery center but it would cost minimum of $250. Is this my only option?

Answer 1

Probably not.  A $250 recovery is just removing the drive from the case, putting it into a computer and getting whatever data is still on there to another medium.  It assumes that the electronics in the case went bad.  The usual failure mode is that the drive itself went bad.  A forensic recovery, getting the data off the drive platters, would cost tens of thousands.  I'd write the drive off.  (Western Digital, or some off brand?  I have a mountain of bad WDs.)

Buy an external USB case and a *good* drive in the future.  (I prefer Seagate Barracuda 7800.11 series drives - and I use a LOT of drives.)  You'll still have an external drive, it'll be cheaper and it'll  be top quality.

Answer 2

If you only used it to back up your internal hard drive, and the same files are on both drives, No it's not worth it.

If you deleted the files from your internal drive, ONLY you can decide what the lost files are worth to you.

TIP:  $250 sounds fishy to me.  If it were $2500, it would be believable.  Nobody does legitimate hard disk recovery for $250.