The stadium went up on a market garden that people still call the cabbage patch, Horace Walpole built himself a gothic fantasy at Strawberry Hill, and there is an island in the middle of the river that once had the loudest hotel in England on it. Twickenham is full of small studios and home offices, and almost all of them now run on solid state storage that gives no warning whatsoever.
Media sent in from Twickenham 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.
SSD and NVMe failure is the modern job and it behaves nothing like the old one. There is no clicking, no grinding and no slow decline to warn anybody. A drive that was working on Friday is simply absent from the boot menu on Monday, because the controller that manages the flash has failed, or the firmware area has corrupted, or the wear levelling has run out of usable blocks to move data into. The chips holding your files are frequently untouched; what has gone is the map that says where everything is. Reading them back means working around the controller rather than replacing a part, and it is quoted at £300 + VAT, exactly the same as a spinning disk.
Two honest warnings belong on this page. The first is that deleted files on an SSD often cannot be recovered at all, because the drive itself erases blocks in the background once the operating system has marked them free, and no software can undo that after the fact. That is a real limitation and no company can engineer round it. The second is that many drives encrypt everything internally against a key held in the controller, so when the controller dies the key can die with it. Both cases are identified at the free diagnostic and told to you straight, before any bill exists.
TW1 and TW2 produce the work you would expect from a district of converted lofts and garden offices. Video and audio people around the studios and the university at Strawberry Hill, designers and consultants working alone, small agencies in the streets off King Street and London Road, and a good number of match-day businesses that run flat out for a handful of Saturdays a year. Add the riverside pubs and restaurants with tills and booking machines, the boatyards and clubs along the towpath towards Eel Pie Island, and the household drives from Whitton, St Margarets and Teddington's edge.
None of it is collected and there is no counter in Twickenham or anywhere in London. The drive travels on its own, packed so it cannot move, tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, arriving the next working day from TW1. An M.2 stick is small and needs to be in an antistatic bag inside something rigid so it cannot flex in transit. Your own courier is fine at your own cost, and mobile phones and tablets are not accepted at all.
The diagnostic costs nothing and closes 2 working days after arrival, ending in one fixed written figure and a plain account of the odds. SSD, NVMe or hard drive, £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives, £250 + VAT. NAS, RAID and servers from £500 + VAT depending on the disc count. CCTV or DVR, £400 + VAT. BitLocker, £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a written report, £800 + VAT. Logical faults run under no fix, no fee. Physical work of every kind, mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level, and anything damaged by water or fire, takes 50% of the quote before the job with the balance only when the files come back. 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.