System can alwats 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).
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Ah see... The problem here is that the front fell off.
Does that happen often?
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.
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.
This needs to be marked NSFT (Not Safe For Techies).
A cellphone repair shop can probably save it for not too much expense. They have te right tools.
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
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 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.
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
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
So expensive data recovery solder op if something critical was on it.
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.
that's nothing a heat gun and some flux cant fix.
why would you even
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. 🥹
That’s an expensive oops.
So the heatsink is not needed? Or did you plan on putting it back afterwards??
I'm so confused.
Mobo probably has its own heatsink, given that they mentioned being unable to remove that and removing the SSD heatsink instead.
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.
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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.
What am I looking at? That doesn't...oh ... Oh my lord.... Brb going to double check my backups in solidarity
Did you just pry it apart?
I did uh.. very carefully.. separate it.. WD used fucking adhesive pads. I thought it was just a bit stuck thin thermal tape.
This is a whole new side of the DRAM vs DRAMless SSD debate.
It's a new product category, DeRAMmed
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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.
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.
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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?
This is your OS disk? How would having a snapshotting OS like btrfs have helped in your situation?
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Insert "I will never financially recover from this" pic
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