As an atheist, I ask for prayers that the backup’s good.
E: Your solidarity has worked. The backup is good and not too old. Note for myself and you - install your OS on a snapshotting filesystem so that live backups are possible.
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System can alwats be reinstalled, just backup your data, that’s the important part. Can recommend Duplicati for windows and Pika backup for Linux (borg frontend that makes it easy).
Ah see… The problem here is that the front fell off.
Does that happen often?
I’m a little drunk, let that be explanation/excuse here:
When I was very young, like 3 or 4, in the early 90’s, I remember seeing commecials for what I now understand are fake fingernails. It was a commercial that showed a woman grabbing her–to a 4 year old–normal woman’s long fingernail, and casually prying it back so that it popped off and hinged back with a sticky yellow goo under it. What the commercial was selling was an acrylic nail that attached to your real nail without messy adhesives, what 4 year old me saw was a woman casually tearing her body apart. To this day I chew my nails to the quick so nothing can get under them, and I’m damn near 40.
This gave me the same “why the FUCK did you pull on it like that?” feeling as that commercial.
I associate this commercial with another commercial for either IcyHot or Blue Star ointment.
This needs to be marked NSFT (Not Safe For Techies).
So the thing on the right is a heat sink and the part that looks like a connector is actually a chip that was ripped off the SSD on the left, correct? That’s unfortunate.
Yup.
A cellphone repair shop can probably save it for not too much expense. They have te right tools.
Thats a good advice, for that to work you just need to remove the solder, reball the memory ic and solder back if there are no broken/ripped pads. If there are any ripped pad then still can be done but you need an expert at microsoldering to rebuild the tracks
Yea i would guess the pads are ripped i have never seen the solder breaking instead of the pads ripping. If that happend to someone near me i would try to fix it since it isnt imposssible if you have some experience and a microscope but not sure if your average repairshop can do that.
I do see one potentially ripped pad on there (top right). The rest seem like they should be fine.
Hard to tell with the image quality though. I’d definitely give it a shot regardless, spend a few bucks to save potentially many times more. Especially in this economy.
I dont think thats a ripped pad. Right(middle to botton) side of the chip whatsoever… Those are ripped 100%. You can still see part of the trace too
how exactly can you tell? just curious
Those thingies sticking out are like part of the traces. It can be solder, but that looks very sus and with the brown shade i assume its the back of a trace hehe
EDIT: and i just noticed there is a fitting mark on the other side. So very very likely ripped traces. And the more i look at it the more i think thats more ripped traces then alive ones hahaSo expensive data recovery solder op if something critical was on it.
50:50 unsolder and transplant all the chips onto a fresh nvme pcb or try to solder jumpers to the traces/pads to the chip long enough to get a data export.
that’s nothing a heat gun and some flux cant fix.
Note to self, make new backup when I get up in the morning.
You don’t already have automatic backups?
Any drive can fail at any time. Eventually, every drive will fail. If you’re not prepared for that, you deserve to lose your data.
No I don’t.
The only things I will actually lose are comics I can download again from mangadex or webtoon, my Seerr requests, and my git forge that holds my docker compose files.
All of those things are OK to lose.
why would you even
Because on the latest ASRock boards it’s damn near impossible to remove their metal heatsink bullshit for installing M2 drives. It’s easier to strip naked the drive and use their bullshit. Except when it isn’t. 🥹
That’s an expensive oops.
So the heatsink is not needed? Or did you plan on putting it back afterwards??
I’m so confused.
Mobo probably has its own heatsink, given that they mentioned being unable to remove that and removing the SSD heatsink instead.
The motherboard has big, built-in heatsinks on its M2 slots. You install a naked NVMe drive in the M2 slots and the motherboard heatsinks (with thermal pads) hug it from both sides.
So you’re a better engineer than whoever designed that metal heat sink “bullshit”.?
Why would you do this? It makes no sense. Hope you learned something.
Lmao these kinds of comments always crack me up. You speak with confidence from a position of ignorance with a sprinkling of “the engineers know best”.
Odd, I do detect someone speaking with confidence from a position of abject cretinitude.
Can you guess who it is?
Two things, an ssd and a motherboard, both with heat sinks built in. You can’t use both heat sinks. One of them has to be removed, and OP chose the wrong one based on the incorrect assumption that the heatsink on the ssd was not held on with such a strong adhesive.
You come in here with essentially “lmao you’re an idiot why would you remove the heatsink? The engineers know what they are doing why would you know better?”
So if they should remove neither of the heat sinks, since an engineer put them both where they are, they should just throw out the drive?
Re-read their comment. They had to remove THIS heatsink because the ASRock mobo made it too difficult to remove the mobo side heatsink, which is meant to go over naked drives
Then either buy the right motherboard or the right drive. Peeling things off at random and then lashing out at the engineering is some kind of tistic temper tantrum for the emotionally disregulated.
Seek therapy.
Not the heatsink in the picture. The motherboard’s M2 heatsinks:
Especially the bottom one. It leaves no space for installing an NVMe with a stock heatsink. To remove it, it requires access to the rear of the board, which now has this big ass metal backplate covering it. So one has to remove the whole backplate to access the screws holding the bottom M2 heatsinks. Only then they can be removed and a factory-heatsinked SSD installed. I thought that would’ve been more work, and I didn’t want to modify a board I have not tested yet that could need to be RMAd if defective.
The lessons for me are:
- Always keep a recent system backup
- Don’t remove stock NVMe heatsinks I did not install myself - they could be glued
- If stuck with such SSDs, mod the motherboard after testing it
Dear dummy, please select your item carefully BEFORE purchasing it.
Duh. Exhausting dealing with people like you.
LMAO, this SSD was purchased many years ago and was in active use. The previous ASRock board it was used in had the same toolless M2 mechanism but did not have a backplate which made the bottom heatsink easily removable, which I had done and this exact SSD was installed in it. The new board’s product page doesn’t say anything about a backplate blocking M2 heatsink removal, or a backplate at all. Given the information available I bought the right product.
Now kindly fuck off.
I’ve done this. I don’t remember the retailer but they let me RMA it when I told them their website had recommended the particular SSD and external enclosure combo being bought together but they wouldn’t fit together without first removing that part.
I will never attempt to do this again. Fucking stupid.
You could maybe reflow it in a toaster oven.
Maybe…
Yes. This is possible to fix with some skill and some flux.
Maybe
Bit hard to tell due to the resolution of the image, but it looks like some traces may have come up with the IC.
Sometimes, pads can still be left behind on the PCB while no longer being connected to the vias underneath them.
Yeah, good point. I’d take a shot at it with the right setup. Nothing to lose.
Worst case scenario is everything else melting off, definitely worth a try
I’ve heard that pad repair is possible… But that would be quite challenging.
What am I looking at? That doesn’t…oh … Oh my lord… Brb going to double check my backups in solidarity
Did you just pry it apart?
I did uh… very carefully… separate it… WD used fucking adhesive pads. I thought it was just a bit stuck thin thermal tape.
This is a whole new side of the DRAM vs DRAMless SSD debate.
It’s a new product category, DeRAMmed
U know, in my panic before remembering I have a backup, I actually considered trying to power it on like that. Maybe the controller could run DRAMless, I thought. Then I came to my senses that running an SSD with potentially shorted traces in a new board is prolly gonna make a bad situation worse.
That might be fixable with a reball. Hard to say from the picture if the pads are damaged, but they look pretty consistent. So either none are damaged, or they all are.
Nah the solder is propably not the thing that broke. From experience i would guess the copper pads are ripped off wich can be repaired but is not easy.
I definitely see a few ripped pads but repair is still probably doable. I’ve repaired similar in the past a few times. It takes some patience to say the least. If that’s a high capacity drive in today’s economy definitely don’t throw it out.
Yea its very doable if you have a microscope, i really like the small repair stuff but i would not be shure if your local phone repair guy is able to fix this. If i were in canada i would take a look at it. Even if it is a 128gb drive i would at least try, either get experience or a working drive nothing to lose.
What did you use for pad replacement in your pictures? I have always used enamel copper wire but i also have seen people use premade pads to gluee on.
They’re just some no-name BGA copper foil repair pads. You can get packs of various sizes for pretty cheap. Scrape to expose remaining trace, solder the new pad in place, remove excess tail, clean, cap with UV solder mask, solder down the chip, etc. They’re pretty easy to work with after some practice.
You’re right. I see now that some of the dots on the chip are teardrop shaped, so most of the copper pads were lifted off the board.
theres a couple torn up pads/traces if you look closely on the chip.
Still probably repairable, but is it worth it if the cost is 50% or more of a new drive, since Op had no significant data loss?
