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

Ah see... The problem here is that the front fell off.

that's nothing a heat gun and some flux cant fix.

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 haha

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.

Odd, I do detect someone speaking with confidence from a position of abject cretinitude.

Can you guess who it is?

Dear dummy, please select your item carefully BEFORE purchasing it.

Duh. Exhausting dealing with people like you.

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.

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.

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?

So expensive data recovery solder op if something critical was on it.

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.

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.

Does that happen often?

System can always 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).

True but this is a complex setup that's been evolving since 2014 is significantly more pain than normal OS reinstall.

Glad your backup worked. I don't backup my desktop or laptop anymore. Everything important is in Nextcloud or on the NAS, and I have scripts to rebuild a fresh system when needed. I have found that works better for me.

You, since you're arguing for a non-existent option where OP somehow respects the mutually incompatible visions of 2 different groups of engineers.

How sad, computing has become too complex for you. Oh well.