SATA connector on 4TB 3.5" drive broke off - pins are fine

cilbuper · 01-15-2021, 11:18 AM

Sorry, no pics of this hard drive issue. Sata data tab connector broke on a 3.5" HD. All the metal pins are fine but the plastic backing snapped off. I fixed it by using a Female -> Male converter that I hot glued into place and I'm betting full continuity w/ no problems with the SATA data pins.

The problem is when mounted on Ubuntu 2004, it's locking my machine up when I try to navigate in Dolphin. Mouse locks up then I have to do hard reboot.

I got 2TB of CRUCIAL data on this 4TB drive and I don't want to send away for "drive savers" and spend $2-3K.

I have no idea why it's causing it to hang, I suspect the connection with sata pins are just a little wonky. So my options are to get an identical PCB & then transfer the tiny 8 pin bios chip (which totally sucks and doesn't always last very long.)

My other option is to solder on 8 wires onto the area circled in the attached pic. connect jumpers & take an old SATA PCB and only just the physical connector (remove the data & power connector from the old PCB from the trash drive) and then connect the jumper cables to the salvage SATA connectors. I think I only have 8 wires - no need to do the power wires as well for this - that didn't break.

So what do you think? Is there any reason that wouldn't work? I'll use 8 identical length pieces of wire so it's basically just extending the distance from the connection on the PCB for the SATA data connectors to 3-6". I just can't see how this would be an issue - but please LMK if you think there may be a problem! Thanks!!

computersavvy · 01-15-2021, 02:06 PM

I think the design of those connectors on the drive requires the plastic backing to apply pressure to those thin contacts for making good contact to the cable end.

If you have the spare junk drive that has a good connector then the best fix I can imagine would be to jumper wire between the good drive with the bad connector and the good connector from the bad drive. That hopefully would work long enough to copy the data off.

smallpond · 01-15-2021, 02:36 PM

You could try your own 7-pin connection but keep in mind the data rate is quite high, over 1 GHz, so you need the data pairs on pins 2-3, and 5-6 to be short twisted pairs close to 100-ohm impedance. Best would be to get separate power and data cables and see if you can get a better data connection.

For a picture, see https://www.datalab247.com/articles/...onnectors.html

Another alternative would be to get a SATA cable, cut off the disk connector and solder the wires to the disk.