Broken plastic from SATA connector

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wongnog

n00b
Joined
Aug 1, 2007
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Okay I made a big boo-boo the other day and broke the plastic around the SATA connector of my 1Gb Seagate 7200.12 drive. Luckily the pins were still intact and my motherboard came with latching SATA cables which made the drive still readable. I immediately backed up the drive and am wondering if the drive is still salvageable, i.e. should I try gluing the plastic bit back on? I have already submitted a warranty claim through Seagate but today I found their page of warranty void items and one of them is broken PCB around SATA connector. :(
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=14de3804f3333210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

Here's a picture of the damage. How careful do I need to be with the glue, is it okay to apply glue to the side of the plastic which is in contact with the pins in order to secure it in place, or can I only put the glue at the then edge?
img8432a.jpg
 
I fixed one of these on a motherboard once by putting some glue only on the edge and carefully putting it back on with tweezers.

I've plugged and unplugged sata cables from it several times without any issues.

You could put glue on the back side of the pins, but if you happen to get any on the surface that mates the sata cable you'll have connection probs.
 
I've got the same problem on a DVD+/-RW. Except, I don't have the broken piece. Waiting for anothe drive to fail so that I can use its parts.
 
My one Seagate drive is broken like this also. My part is stuck in the Sata cable, I just use it as is. Drive is dying anyways so I don't care.
 
Well since the drive worked without the piece glued back in I'm pretty sure I could glue it to ensure a more snug fit. I would just be paranoid that my drive could fail at any minute. Maybe I'll backup more frequently. :p
 
Hop-Scotch said:
My one Seagate drive is broken like this also. My part is stuck in the Sata cable, I just use it as is. Drive is dying anyways so I don't care.
Click to expand...

I have an old hitachi 80gb drive that is like that, i still have it somewhere. Works fine but I wouldn't trust it.

wongnog - when you get it running, back it up ASAP and dont use the drive again, just get a new drive
 
ripken204 said:
wongnog - when you get it running, back it up ASAP and dont use the drive again, just get a new drive
Click to expand...

Ya you know what that's what I've done. I didn't need to glue the piece back in order to access the data, so quickly imaged it to a partition on another drive. The only reason I'd glue it back on is if I wanted to be cheap and take the risk that I can stretch out the drive longer.
 
update: Well, colour me surprised! I called Seagate support to confirm if the RMA request I submitted is valid and they assured me that yes, physical damage of this sort is still covered under warranty. She said they replace damage like this all the time, such as external drives where the usb plug has been pushed inside the enclosure. The only time it would not be is if I unscrewed the drive or tried to open it up. So I'm glad I didn't try and glue the piece back on yet! I pay for $10 advanced RMA which means they UPS a replacement to me first and then I ship my defective drive back using their prepaid shipping label. So fingers crossed that all works out and they don't end up charging my credit card for the full replacement drive (it says in my order they will if they don't receive my damaged drive within 25 days).
 
I had that happen to an original Raptor (the 37GB one), and WD basically said "Sucks to be you", so kudos to Seagate.

I just used the drive as a "junk drive". Ran a second install of Windows on it for when I took my PC to LAN parties so it could run as a game server or for when I was pirating games back then (damn, it's been 6 years!).
 
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