Broken pin on a SATA drive -- can I save it?

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c0ncept

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Dec 10, 2006
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First off, my apologies if this isn't the proper board for this question. Mods feel free to drop it in the right place for me if so.

A friend of mine gave me a 500gb WD SATA drive which I've been using for a few months now. At the time he gave it to me, the pins that the cable connects to were bent and not very stable. I knew this wasn't good, but the drive functioned on my computer and I left well enough alone.

This evening, I noticed that I could no longer access the drive. I opened up the case, removed the SATA cable, and along with it came one of the pins. The computer won't detect the drive no matter what angle I "lean" the cable, as I was thinking it still might be able to make the connection if I held it in a certain position. No success.

Anyone have any idea if I can save this drive? It isn't absolutely vital, though, as I only used it to store excess movies and other stuff that took up a lot of space. I use a different 500gb WD SATA drive very similar to this one as my primary drive. However, that drive doesn't have the same style of SATA plug. It doesn't have the individual pins like this malfunctioning drive does.

Here's a picture for perspective:

Z9uYm.jpg


Thanks for any assistance.
 
you could try moving some parts over from a failed drive...probably be pretty hard, but fun
 
I had to deal with this with an old 80GB WD drive many years ago (SATA 1.5gbps days). I bent the pin back into position and super glued the broken plastic pin support piece back to the drive. I then connected a SATA cable to the drive and hot glued it to the drive to prevent it being disconnected and breaking off the tab on the drive again. I used to drive for another year or two without issues before I retired it.

It's worth a shot. Let us know how it goes.
 
Outside pin is a ground connection (there are two more on the connector) so it should work to copy data off. I wouldn't trust the drive for any more than that.
 
@c0ncept: as siliconnerd already pointed out, the pin that's missing is a ground connection and there are two more (total of 3 out of the 7 pins are ground connections). That's not your problem. Your problem is that the plastic part that physically supports the actual connections is missing (broken). Unless you have this piece and you could super glue it back into place, it will be hard for you to get a reliable connection going. If you are handy with a soldering iron, you could either try to replace the entire connector (power and data) with one from a donor drive, or you could butcher a sata cable and solder the connections directly to the drive. This would allow you to at least get access to the data to retrieve it and then retire the drive...
 
That plastic piece is universal, rip one off an old dead motherboard. I do this all the time to fix drives and other like thigjns that I break
 
Thank you for the replies guys. I really appreciate it. This might have to be a project that I save for Fall break. My classes have been taking all my time as of late, but I do have an older motherboard lying around that I could check for that plastic piece.
 
You don't have a "special" kind of SATA port with only metal pins (that would be really fragile, as you discovered), you have a broken SATA port, with the plastic part broken off. You used it like this for months ? Maybe the broken plastic part went into the connector of the cable, allowing a "durable" connexion.
 
At least you're far from screwed. Worst case you still have plenty of meat there to (carefully) solder a sata cable on and get the data off. Try other things first though.
 
was me I would desolder the whole header and put one on from a dead drive...that $2.37 part would be tempting though...half the work
 
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