Amy’s Macbook has a broken optical drive, so she bought an external USB DVDRW drive to replace it. Recently the drive has stopped working, either failing to power up or briefly flashing its green LED. With nothing much to lose, we took it apart to find out what was inside and to see if there was an obvious fault.
The internals of the drive were very simple – a standard laptop SATA DVDRW drive and a thin PCB to connect the drive to USB. This thin PCB was the source of the fault. From the image above you can see the PCB is in two parts – one part contains the USB connector, and the other part the interface to the drive. The part with the connector is supposed to join at 90 degrees to the interface board and that’s what had broken, presumably the mechanical stress of unplugging the large USB cable broke the solder joints. It’s a very cheap quality USB drive and solder was the only thing holding the two pieces of PCB together.
Originally I intended on simply resoldering the connections, but I found out the tracks on the board had been lifted off and were snapped. Instead I used some short lengths of wire to remake the connections. It’s a bit of a mess and the casing no longer shuts properly, but the drive appears to be usable again. There were some errors when reading an audio CD, so it’s possible the drive is also damaged, but if that’s the case we might have a spare SATA optical drive to replace it with.
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