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.

why would you even

Did you just pry it apart?

This needs to be marked NSFT (Not Safe For Techies).

What am I looking at? That doesn't...oh ... Oh my lord.... Brb going to double check my backups in solidarity

You could maybe reflow it in a toaster oven.

Maybe...

Note to self, make new backup when I get up in the morning.

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. 🥹

I did uh.. very carefully.. separate it.. WD used fucking adhesive pads. I thought it was just a bit stuck thin thermal tape.

That’s expensive in today’s economy

Have you tried soldering it back on?

Yes. This is possible to fix with some skill and some flux.

I wish I had the skill to solder BGA. 😅

Did you film it so you at least have footage for a teardown video?

Kiwi on a rock

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.

F

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.

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

Looks like some pads ripped off with it, not impossible but definitely would be a bitch to fix. Though, in this economy, it may be worth it

That’s an expensive oops.

This is a whole new side of the DRAM vs DRAMless SSD debate.

Insert "I will never financially recover from this" pic

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.

It's a new product category, DeRAMmed

A cellphone repair shop can probably save it for not too much expense. They have te right tools.

This is your OS disk? How would having a snapshotting OS like btrfs have helped in your situation?

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.

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

Root on Btrfs/ZFS would have ensured I have a root backup from an hour ago. Ext4 (without LVM) means I can only make a backup every now and then when I turn off the machine, boot into alt OS and take an offline copy.

If push comes to shove, it can be done in a pizza oven.

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.

So the heatsink is not needed? Or did you plan on putting it back afterwards??

I'm so confused.

Soldering it off and on again!

IT crowd noises

With the disk effectively fubar how would the snapshot from an hour ago of helped?

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.

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've heard that pad repair is possible... But that would be quite challenging.

Would've been transferred to the big redundant storage. Whe using ZFS in particular, local snapshots are essentially instant, then ZFS transfers only the missing snapshot delta to the other ZFS storage, delta tends to be very small and therefore fast. Put those thigs together and hourly live full system backups become very practical. I already have this setup for my laptop. Restoring a complete system from backup becomes - ZFS sync from the backup to the new drive, restore the EFI partition, boot from it.

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.

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.

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

Mobo probably has its own heatsink, given that they mentioned being unable to remove that and removing the SSD heatsink instead.

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

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?

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.

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”.

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.