Broken and burnt pins in sata power connector compent of my HDD

[Gasbak]

Hello Linus Tech Tips,

I have a HDD with 2 burnt out sata pins and would like to get this thing running again. I have a soldering gun and the likes but am wondering how I should go about making the connections. should I make a custom sata power connector by stripping a connector to its wires and soldering the wires on to the pins according to the pinout? I have done a lot of reading and looking and it seems its the 3rd pin-orange wired 3.3v and the 4rth pin ground colored in black on a power connector. Can someone give me some pointers here? I really want to do this but want to make sure I do it right. I do not have a back up of the data on here (HUGE MISTAKE AND THOUGHT I WOULD NEVER BE IN SUCH SITUATION). I have a bitcoin wallet on here and want to extract my BTC from this and be done with it.

 

If you want more pictures I can get more.

[Razor Blade]

I've seen this happen before with crap-tastic power connectors but usually it is the 12V side the melts... Some drives don't even need the 3.3V line so you might be able to plug in a power connector to see if the drive still powers on. Just be very careful with those other two 3.3V pins that are sticking out so you don't end up bending those into the ground as well.

 

 

If it is a no-go my honest opinion is if the drive has important data that isn't backed up, I always suggest looking at data recovery services to people. For something like this where it is just a power plug failure, it might not even be that expensive.

[mariushm]

You shouldn't have to do anything.

 

Looks like the SATA connector from the power supply went bad and caused a short between one of the 3.3v pins and one of the ground pins, and the weakest links broke (the pins overheated and melted the plastic and eventually broke.

 

All the pins in the SATA power connector are in groups of 3 , you have 3 pins with 3.3v , 3 pins with ground, 3 pins with 5v , 3 pins with ground, 3 pins with 12v.

You have only 1 pin out of 3.3v group and ground group broken, as long as the others are still soldered, your hard drive should still work.

 

Heat the 3.3v pins a bit to make sure they're still soldered, and that's about it.

 

BTW, if we're talking mechanical SATA drive, the drive is highly unlikely to use 3.3v in the first place, even regular SSDs only use 5v these days, because presence of 3.3v in the power connector is not guaranteed.

 

So if the drive doesn't start, I'd look at the Sata power connector from the power supply first, and then maybe I'd check the fuses on the hard drive

Use a multimeter in continuity mode to make sure there's no short between the 3.3v ground 5v and 12v on the hard drive itself (without any power connector plugged in)

 

Personally, I'd add a bit of liquid flux over all the pins in the sata power connector and then tap each pin with the soldering iron and a bit of solder to wet the pins again and make sure they're soldered. When the short happened and the pins overheated, the other pins may have overheated as well and you may have cold joints now.

[Gasbak]

Thank you for the responses. I will get back to you guys some time later. May be a while as I have gotten busier with summer schedule coming up. Thanks again!