Surface Mount Soldering

FX_Munkee

Anybody have any experience/equipment recommendations?
Long story short: My sister in law has dumped her defunct WD "my passport" external drive on me as it's dead in the water. It still spins up and sounds fine but there's no contacting the IO controller.
Turns out it's one of the new type of external drive that has a built in USB controller (so can't just dock it into a std SATA connector) but apparently the SATA terminals are on the PCB I just have to wire directly to them... Also there may or may not be hardware encrytion on it, great..
So, before I get out my pointiest soldering iron tip, has anybody any advice (other than don't buy a WD external drive!)

Danny1969

Oh god I see loads of those drives, they are forever failing. Difficult to do unless you have an exact same good one. I've never bypassed the USB interface, only ever fixed what's there but you need a good one to work out what is a cap and what is an OC resistor etc. 

Converting directly to SATA might not be easy as the system uses 4 cables with 2 diff pairs, not an easy thing to wire at sm level 

Be careful you don't go down a dead end street. If there's no output from the pre amp the drive will spin up but nothing will ever be found. The pre amp lives inside the drive so changing anything external won't help. 

I don't have a high success rate with these drives, probably only fix about 40% and some I have spent hours on

FX_Munkee

Thanks for the advice, I'm 50:50 between finding a compatible SATA board from an old drive (hours of trawling ebay and waiting) and direct wiring. I know the pinouts and they're spaced enough to get wires onto (I think) so was going to have a bash at lashing something up.
Needless to say you have filled me with confidence...

Danny1969

I'm not sure changing the controller board would work because nowadays there's specific information about the actual drive located in the firmware of the controller board. In the old days it certainly worked, I changed loads just by making sure the model was the same and (very important) the firmware version but the last time I did that successfully was about a 160 to 250Gb drive, it hasn't worked on anything 500Gb ish or bigger

Let me know if the Sata conversion works, that could help me out the next time one comes in

FX_Munkee

it's a 500Gb one knowing my luck I'll get it working only to find it has hardware encryption.
I'll let you know when I've broken it though (the drive not the encryption).