A lot of people arrive here having already stood at a service counter in Collegeville and been told the drive has to go away somewhere. That’s an honest answer, and it’s worth understanding rather than resenting. A retail service desk can handle software problems, transfers and machines that still work. A drive that has physically failed needs a clean room, and no store has one — so it goes to a partner laboratory for a ballooned quote, shipped out of state, on a queue you can’t see and exposed to many risks.

Two things follow from that, and both are worth knowing before you agree to anything. Ask which laboratory it goes to and whether you can speak to them first — on most retail arrangements the answer is that you deal with the store, not with whoever opens the drive. And ask what the price will be or what’s actually wrong with it, because the figure quoted at a counter is normally a starting point set by the lab afterwards, once your only copy is already several hundred miles away.

It means there’s an extra company, an extended timeframe, lost chain-of-custody, an extra hand-off and an extra margin between you and the bench — and it’s why the staff at these counters quite often point people toward an independent laboratory instead, particularly when the drive is clicking, somebody is upset about sentimental data or a small business is down because of a lost database. If that’s how you got here, you were given good advice.