Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Haverhill Research Park sits on the northern edge of the town inside an Enterprise Zone, with older manufacturing ground — electronics, plastics, pharmaceuticals and food production — across the estates around it.
Roughly 32 minutes and 20 miles separate Haverhill from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Withersfield, Kedington, Steeple Bumpstead and the wider Suffolk area.
Twenty miles south-east down the A1307, a little over half an hour. A single road most of the way.
Haverhill was built out as an overspill town and kept a manufacturing base that most Suffolk towns lost — electronics, plastics, pharmaceuticals and food production on the industrial estates around the edge. What comes in from here is factory-adjacent: process control machines, quality and batch records, CAD and tooling data from small engineering firms. It is one of the few catchments where we regularly see industrial PCs still running Windows XP because the machine they control will not accept anything else.
Haverhill Research Park sits on the northern edge of the town inside an Enterprise Zone, with older manufacturing ground — electronics, plastics, pharmaceuticals and food production — across the estates around it.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Manufacturing systems. Process and quality control machines, batch and traceability records, CAD and CAM data from tooling firms. Legacy operating systems and ageing IDE and early SATA media are more common here than in any other catchment we serve.
Before you do anything else. On an industrial machine, photograph the connections before you remove anything. Legacy drives from process equipment are often on interfaces nobody documents, and the photograph saves an afternoon later.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Haverhill and across Cambridgeshire starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Haverhill. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Haverhill.
None of these earn us anything. They are here because all four come up by phone most weeks.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy it off now, most important files first, and stop using the disk. There is nothing a clean-air bench adds to a drive you can still open.
The system is still running on a mirror. On a degraded RAID 1 or 5 the data is usually still live. Take a copy off it before you do anything else — that is a considerably cheaper afternoon than a recovery.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Read-only software installed to a different drive often handles this for a fraction of our fee, provided the disk itself is sound.
There is an older copy you have forgotten. An external from two years ago, a laptop that was replaced, a copy sent to an accountant. A meaningful share of enquiries end here, in five minutes, for nothing.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01223 655015.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm. We’re about twenty miles away via the A1307, roughly 32 minutes. Or post it insured — return shipping is free either way.
We can give you the band immediately — the published prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive. The exact figure is fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic, and it does not move afterwards.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do.
Regularly. NDAs signed as standard, one named contact from diagnostic to delivery, invoicing rather than card payment for established firms, and a written account of what failed for insurers or auditors.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, on a logical fault with healthy hardware dropped in early. Physical recoveries cannot be compressed that far — priority handling moves you to the front of the queue but cannot make a failing drive read faster.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 11 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.