The Crapiest Cheap USB_SATA adapter EVER sold.

[guipoletto]

Well, i saw it on DX, and decided to give it a try, since a have some laptop HDD's sitting arround.
My packet arrived, i went trough playing with the new gadgets, and BOOM, the bloody USB to SATA thing wouldn't work.

So, of course, i opened it. And it was worse than i could ever imagine. Take a look at the bastard.

Off course i de-soldered the crystal, cleaned that flux mess, put a spacer(made out of shrink tubing), and grounded the case of the crystal.

After that it worked OK.

Interesting thing is that when i was fixing it, i could hear mr. Dave Jones inside my head feeling disgusted by the cheapness and crapness of the adapter, and screaming "Just hammer it to pieces, on general principle!!!".. KKKKK

[linux-works]

soldering to the xtal was not a super smart move.  you may have changed its freq with heat like that.

I see they left one wire on the xtal unsoldered.  that's probably all you had to do, why unsolder the xtal at all?

yes, us users are the new QA dept for china.  they don't care - they REALLY don't.  they got your money and could care less if the item works or not.

[free_electron]

are my eyes getting old or does that chip really read surplusIT ?

[linux-works]

lol, sun plus.

http://www.sunplus.com/

[guipoletto]

I unsoldered the crystal because it was probable that the case was shorting(RF) the 12mhz lines, and it looked very bad from the top, so i cleaned a lot of flux from the bottom of the can too, added a spacer(so as to keep the impedance of the clock lines ), and re-soldered it without making a mess on the component side of the PCB.

The whole adapter is so cheap that i don't care shifting a crystal oscillating freq...  it wasn't even a very precise one anyway(25,0).

[linux-works]

uhm, yes you DO care about shifting the freq.  the usb freq is fixed and if you move it, your pc may experience usb timeouts, errors or just not even connect at all.

if the solder mask was broken under the xtal, that would be a reason to insulate.  was it scratched or shorting?

[guipoletto]

Just dirty with something. It looked too close to the pcb, anyway. it worked.
If it was something really important, i wouldn't be so interventive, but as it is, it cost me $7.99.

http://www.dx.com/en/p/dual-usb-male-to-sata-connection-cable-w-2-5-hdd-protective-case-black-20cm-40cm-207988

[casinada]

It's not uncommon to solder the Crystal case to ground using a wire or directly to the PCB.

[linux-works]

on a pcb that I designed, I have a wire looping over the xtal, but I do not recommend soldering to it:



that grounds it, keeps it from flopping around and never puts any heat to the can, itself.

if you can solder the can very very quickly, that's ok; but there are other ways to ground the case than to solder TO it.

[calexanian]

Its common with cylindrical crystals to solder them down laid over on their side for mechanical security, but in that type of package it just looks kludgey. 

[Shock]

Sexy

[han]

sorry, couldn't help myself 

[Psi]

A lot of the stuff from DX is like that. You only notice when you open it up, or if the product comes with the PCB visible.

They run it through pick-n-place then reflow the SMT parts, so they're usually not to bad.
The they underpay workers to solder the throughhole stuff by hand.
Probably get pay based on how many they can do, hence the crap quality.

Maybe they have to pay for solder wire out of their pay, it would explain why the joints always look like they never added new solder.

[guipoletto]

Total solder time was under 1/2 a second (to the case, i pre-tinned the pcb.), and with a relativelly cold iron.

Thanks for the heads up in not cooking the crystal case. I promess to be more carefull in the future!