SATA pin broke- possible to transfer drive?

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randy5554

Limp Gawd
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Aug 10, 2005
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I have this Western Digital SE16 drive and I somehow broke one of the SATA pins on the drive. Would it be possible for me to buy another one, and somehow take apart my current drive and transfer the stored material in the "body" of the drive (taking the new one apart as well to make room). I wish to keep this data if possible.

I didn't word this too well; does this make sense?
 
How badly is the pin broke? Pics?

Wait this is SATA? Did you break the whole connector? Cannot see how you could break a single pin on SATA? Did you just break the power pin? If just the power then it should not be to big a deal to solder in a wire to "get by" to power up the drive for a save the data mission. Possible to make an even more permanent solution.

I would not dismantle a good drive to save the old, I would try to fix the broken part.
 
I don't have a camera handy, but here's a similar pic:


One of those seven little pins broke off. I tried getting another pin from somewhere else and just kind of sticking it in there and then plugging in the cable, but I couldn't get it to work.
 
What would be easier than dismantling a perfectly good harddrive would be to take a SATA cable, cut off on end and solder the cable directly to the broken drive. Course make sure you have a good pinout of the cable and the pins on the drive. ;)

If you can get the male SATA connector it may be easier to just replace that on the drive itself, however I would NOT buy a Harddrive just for this connector.
 
if you can't get a cable to work on it, you can get an identical drive (has to have the same firmware iirc) and then swap the controller boards. I have no clue how hard this is to do though.
 
randy5554 said:
You think something like this SATA male connector here would work? I'm not sure exactly how I would install it, but I could do more research into that aspect.
Click to expand...

Yep one of those will work, you probably need one with a right angle end. Probably need to take the controller board off and then desolder the old connector then just solder on the new one. Now that I think about it, depending on how the controller board is connected to the drive you may be able to do a controller board swap without having to doing any soldering. However this would require you buying an EXACT harddrive as the broken one, which may or may not be possible and you could end up with 2 dead drives versus 1.
 
To be honest, and I've got experience at this, Just swap the controller board, it's real easy....There's not much to it, all you have to do is get a Torx driver and unscrew the card, and screw it onto the hard drive....
 
Thanks for the help. I think I'll give that adapter a try first (obviously it's about $110 cheaper than buying a new drive and replacing the controller board).
 
is the pin breaking your fault or just a bad design somehow? You could always do a RMA on the drive and when the new one comes do the board swap. Call the company and tell them what happen you never know what they might say to do.
 
u can temporarily bridge a pin , but be careful , ur hdd mite spark and blow so be careful !
i had this prob once , the ide cable connector pshed the ide hdd pins out of its sockets, exact same as ur prob . so i bridged a pin , and it wuld freeze at post , i re bridged again properly and it boot straight to xp :D i was so scared , i transfer my shit to usb hdd then rma the dam thing
 
Rtstrider said:
To be honest, and I've got experience at this, Just swap the controller board, it's real easy....There's not much to it, all you have to do is get a Torx driver and unscrew the card, and screw it onto the hard drive....
Click to expand...
You're right. But I think you forgot to mention disconnecting and reattaching all the connectors between the controller card and the drive body.
 
I found a site with a ton of those SATA connectors here. Anyone know offhand which exact kind I need? I'm still waiting to hear from Western Digital about an RMA, so I'm not sure if I should start unscrewing it now.
 
It looks like this one'd work. Good luck with the soldering - if you go through with this, it's likely you won't be able to RMA it, so consider it a last resort.

 
If you can get a really clean solder job, it'll work fine. Just be very careful. Good luck with that.
 
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