The Borders Railway changed the sums: Galashiels is now an hour’s direct ride from the bench, and the central Borders — textile country, with Heriot-Watt’s School of Textiles and Design in the town — sends its failed drives north by train, by A7, or by the padded box.
Insured post from anywhere in Scotland, or bring it to Princes Street yourself — the diagnostic costs nothing either way.
Tweedbank-to-Waverley made the Borders commutable, and Galashiels sits one stop in — an hour’s ride with a five-minute walk at the top, which for anything precious beats trusting even a good courier. The A7 does it by road; the post does it for everyone else. The caseload wears local colours: design files and archives around the textile trade, student work from the Heriot-Watt campus, and the region-wide constants of externals, family photo drives and deletions that need the machine switched off now. Selkirk, Melrose and the villages share the corridor and the terms.
Whatever failed — a hard drive gone clicking, an SSD vanished from the BIOS, a NAS with a crashed volume or a card full of photographs — either way the bench treats it identically: the diagnosis lands free within a day or two, a real price follows in writing, and most jobs carry no fee at all if the recovery doesn't succeed. Single-drive work starts at £300 + VAT, stated plainly.
Often remarkably so: drives that were parked healthy tend to age gently, and 'won't spin after a decade' is frequently seized bearings around intact platters. Send them as they are; the free diagnostic inventories what decades of design work survived.
For irreplaceables, marginally: same-day arrival and your own hands the whole way. For everything else, post wins on convenience and loses only a day. The recovery itself can't tell which way the drive travelled.