Thoughts on an unorthodox hard drive recovery technique

 I have a 1TB drive in an external enclosure. That drive failed. From the clicking sound it made, I'm pretty sure it's a hardware failure.

That drive contained about 800Gig of stuff that was not saved elsewhere - stupid, I know - including all of my MP3s, and all of the modeling I've done for the mod that had not been pushed to the subversion repository, or released with a mod or track update.

The drive itself is still under warranty. However, Hard Drives Northwest - local computer shop that used to specialize in hard drives, hence the name - has that same model drive in stock for $59.

Here's what I'm thinking. 

I can either suck it up, admit defeat, and get a replacement hard drive for free under warranty with no chance of ever recovering the data. Or, I can take a chance, buy a replacement drive, pop the covers and swap the platters in an attempt to recover the data. If this doesn't work, I'm out two drives as the warranty on both will be voided by breaking the seal. If it works, well, $59 is cheap as far as data recovery costs go.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice?

Does swapping platters even still work by hand?  Are the parts and assemblies still macro enough to do that anymore?

edit: how much does a local data recovery shop charge to try, and how does that compare in price?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/

That may be less expensive, they do work as i have had that happen, fortunatley it was photo's so I was able to printscreen and steal them without paying.

 The problem is that it was a hardware failure. If it's a software failure, like a missing FAT table or MBR or something, that's recoverable through software. It sounds like that may be the sort of failure you had if their software was able to recover the data for you. I've tried a number of software-based recovery solutions already, and one thing they all say is that in order to recover data, your system has to at least "see" the drive correctly. Right now, my system sees the drive as a single, 3Gb partition that needs to be initialized. That's 900GB+ that it doesn't even see.

The quotes I've gotten for hardware recovery are anywhere from $300 to $1000+, and talking with the techs, pretty much all they do is swap the platters. The only difference is that they have a clean room environment to do the swap in. One of the more expensive places said there was no charge to try, but if they recovered data, they charge $2/GB, minimum $500. So if they recovered the full 800GB, that would be $1600...pretty steep for data that's really not that critical. Most of the stuff was backups of stuff already on my system drive. The only thing that really hurt were the MP3s and the 3D models. And it's not worth spending a couple hundred to try and recover those. I can always re-rip the CDs, and re-build the models. I'm just debating whether or not it's worth spending $60 to try and recover it on my own.

I lost 50gb of rfactor mods/tracks, and my whole cd collection. Those can be recovered elsewhere, it was the photo's, I was impressed with the software as it did show me everything on the h/d, and it was about $60 to get the full recovery.  My h/d too wasn't showing as a physical drive due to the data being corrupt.  I havent seen those prices your talking of, thats steep.

ps, never accept defeat!