It is possible you pull the plastic shroud off the mobo. Typically that leaves the pins in place, and you can normally get the plastic back on if you are careful.
Basically take care when pulling a cable free - some have metal locking clips, you need to squeeze the clips to remove the plug. Also take care with right angled sockets that deflect the SATA plug to the side - they don't like being accidentally yanked straight up (DAMHIK!)
Yup that is another option. SATA devices can be "hot swapped" with the right kind of mounted connector.
Probably by desoldering the original connector and fitting a new one. They are typically through hole mounting and right at the edge of the board which makes them a bit easier - especially if you have a hot air rework station.
Desolder the old broken component, insert a new one and solder it in. Solder sucker is the neatest but fluxed copper wick will do at a pinch.
You need a fairly beefy soldering iron and a good magnifying glass to check the joints but it isn't rocket science. Closer to plumbing!
The ground planes on PC motherboards make certain pins rather hard to melt the solder on with anything but a thermostatically controlled high power soldering iron. It is just about DIYable if you can solder.
I have replaced the odd failed capacitor in my time. Back in the days of the stolen Murata capacitor formula and the knock off Chinese fakes that failed after 3-4 years by internal gassing.
The first generation vertical ones had no mechanical strength when you pulled on them. I have an Asrock 4Core family board (VIA chipset) with two of those connectors on it.
The pins are thruhole, with very little excess pin length. The end pins are a forked piece of metal, intended to keep the connector in the board during soldering. First, clean up with solder wick or a Solder Sucker, then insert a new connector. You can only fit a connector, with the same thruhole pattern. Modern connectors may be SMT and not compatible, so repair parts won't be available indefinitely.
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If you pull on the cable, the thing comes off the board.
Cables with second generation metal "jaw" on the end, the jaw must be fully depressed while you attempt to remove the cable. Inspect the jaw action, before installing the cable, so you know how it works later.
What I would do with those cables, is once you select the right cable for the job (straight on one end, right-angle on the other end), leave the cable connected to the motherboard whether a drive is installed for it or not. The cables do not mind just sitting there, with no drive. Both my computers here are run that way. Just don't jam the cables into areas with high voltages or exposed wiring.
You could run a bad block scan (as a way to get continuous-reads going), and hold a hand to the thing to see if it is getting warm at all.
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This is a result for an SSD drive here (2.5"). The graph is a bit more curious looking than I expected.
[Picture] If the frame is blank, right-click and select "Reload"
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What the graph tells me, is there is no thermal tape inside the drive, between the controller IC and the metal lid. It cools down a bit slowly, as if it is isolated from the case thermally. Some 2.5" drives have used a bit of thermal tape, but you can see with the 10C temp rise, that there's really no reason for tape particularly.
Where the drives do feel it, is in laptops where the 2.5" bay has zero air circulation. Some laptops a decade ago, it would say right in the instructions to "use 5900 RPM drives instead of 7200 RPM drives" and this was because there was not a lot of thermal headroom. The lack of cooling was that serious. On a desktop, there should be plenty of air. While there is one desktop case, which had very poor circulation, most are OK for this.
My drive was pretending to run at SATA III rates. The web page might quote 500MB/sec, but it doesn't run that fast, only about 380MB/sec or so. Your SATA cable is SATA II, and because of the cable limit, your drive will use even less power than mine.
Now, you see that graph -- I can't even feel that heat. I can tell from the drive casing, that the case temperature is "driven". It does not feel entirely like "cold metal", but the casing itself is not 35C. It's a lot closer to ambient.
If the graph had shot up to 70C, then, there would be a concern. There's so much headroom there, I could easily use this on a summers day (when the room is 38C and the drive is 50C inside). And for this test, the drive was not "clamped down".
I have not noticed the enclosure of a SATA drive getting that warm - the limiting influence of the SATA interface probably goes a fair way to prevent you really pushing the drive. NVMe drives however can run quite HOT IME, and benefit from some heatsinking.
Yes. My eldest son has fairly high performance laptop that we got him for university. He found that both NVMe drives (one in particular) got hot. Adding a good thermal transfer compound and milled down heatsinks dropped the temperatures dramatically (from mid 70s to low 40s).
NVMe drives are fairly compact, so there's nowhere for the heat to go unless you heatsink them. SATA drives are mostly fresh air, with a small PCB next to the connector, and a nice metal chassis to heatsink it against. Result is they don't tend to get warm, especially in desktop applications.
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