The first baseline of the Ordnance Survey was measured across Hounslow Heath in 1784, and the borough has been in the business of moving things accurately ever since. The Golden Mile still runs west along the Great West Road under the Gillette clock tower, and beyond it sits the airport that never stops, which means neither do the machines that keep track of what is on it.
Media sent in from Hounslow is diagnosed free. One written figure lands before any work starts: £300 + VAT a single drive or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or stick, arrays from £500 + VAT.
Freight is what makes Hounslow different from anywhere else on this list. Cargo agents, customs brokers, handling companies and forwarders around the airport perimeter and the estates off the A4 run systems that cannot be turned off: consignment tracking, airway bills, customs entries, proof of delivery scans, temperature logs for pharmaceutical and perishable freight. Those machines run continuously in warm rooms for years, and continuous duty is exactly what wears a hard drive out. When one stops, the immediate problem is not IT at all, it is that a shipment cannot be evidenced and the paperwork has to be produced from somewhere.
The failures follow the hours. A drive that has spun for six or seven years without a break will usually give a little warning if anyone is listening: the machine slows for weeks, certain folders take an age to open, the event log fills with read errors nobody reads. By the time it will not boot, the drive has often been struggling for a month. Leaving it powered on while somebody decides what to do is the most common and most expensive mistake here. Switch it off, take the drive out, and post it, because each additional hour of a failing disk being read costs a little more of it.
The rest of TW3, TW4 and TW5 supplies a busy, ordinary mix. Hotels along the Bath Road with property management systems and camera recorders. Vehicle hire, parking and coach operations with booking data. Restaurants, shops and cash-and-carry businesses through Hounslow town centre and Heston with tills. Small manufacturers and workshops still occupying the Art Deco frontages of the Golden Mile. And households in Cranford, Isleworth, Lampton and Hanworth with an external drive holding photographs that in a lot of cases are the only copies in two countries.
The bench is not at the airport and not in London: it is in Guildford, about twenty-five miles down the M25 and the A3. Everything gets there by post. Take the bare drive out of the server or the machine, pack it so it cannot shift, and send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, which from TW5 is next working day. If your operation already has a courier on account, book it and pay for it yourselves and nothing changes at this end. No collection is offered anywhere on this network.
Nothing is charged to find out what is wrong. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after arrival, never sooner, and ends in one fixed figure in writing. Any one hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Servers, NAS boxes and arrays begin at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV or DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level work, and water or fire damage, take half the quoted price up front with the balance due only when the data is recovered. Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Nearly every job here arrived as a parcel. Tracked, insured post is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and something handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London is normally on the Guildford bench the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.
Nothing to pay for the diagnosis, £300 + VAT for a single drive or SSD, and £250 + VAT for a card or stick.