External HD not spinning up – costly if possible to recover?

I have a Lacie 500GB external HD that won’t spin up – it just tick-tick-ticks and never whirrs up to life. I can feel the platter freely spin when I rock it back and forth so I’m sure it’s not seized. Anyone have experience with recovering data from such a situation and, above all, what kind of price would a disk recovery cost me?

When the controller inside of a hard drive goes, you need the same controller to mate the platens with. Taking apart a hard drive requires a clean room…. one that is completely free of dust. The platens are removed, and put inside another casing, and your data is recovered, sector by sector.

This why such a job can run into the THOUSANDS of dollars in come cases.