can i recover saves from a defective hard drive?

hi, so recently i had to purchase a new external hard drive due to the fact that mine had stopped working entirely. i got it checked out and if i wanted data recovery it would be $500, so i just got a new one and moved on. the problem is, my whole ea folder was on my hard drive. i was okay with losing most of it, but i'm pretty upset that i lost my saves and i didn't have a backup for them. i was just wondering if there was any way to recover my saves, if not it's perfectly fine!