About a year ago while helping my neighbor transfer some PC components between cases I noticed the plastic for the power side of the SATA connector on his LG Blu-ray drive was cracked. He agreed to let me attempt to fix it, however, upon de-soldering 6 pads were lifted and one was torn off.
Fudge.
As such, the drive sat on my "to fix someday" pile until recently. I picked up a hot air rework station (Atten 898D) and a new panavise among some other things. Also fluxed solder wick. I have no idea how I lived without this but it makes life 1000% easier. This was my main problem when working on the connector the first time. I also picked up an SMD soldering practice board. A few hours later I felt ready to give it a go.
First, I removed the rest of the remaining solder from the pads as gently as I could and laid back down the pads that were only lifted with a dab of super glue underneath. I had a scratch sheet of paper handy where I listed the damaged pads and referenced it with the SATA pinout. Fortunately, the pinout is quite repetitive with +3.3v, COM, +5v, and +12 v all being grouped together (Fig. 1). Data is a little less simple but the damage to those pads was less significant.
Figure 1: SATA Pinout
Overall, the pad on pin 4 for data was gone and 1 & 3 for +3.3v, 5, 10 & 11 for GND, and 8 for +5v were only lifted. I tinned the pads and soldered a new Amphenol connector in. On pin 4 for data I used a piece of 30 AWG bodge wire to connect to another ground (pin 1). On the power connector pads I soldered a piece of 24 AWG stranded wire from some Belden mic cable I had. Mostly for strain relief but also in case one of the pads does break free in the future.
Figure 2: Re-soldering
Its alive!! After cleaning off the flux and some stress testing by playing a disk on repeat for a day or so to make sure nothing would burn up I think it's safe to say it's fixed!
