OK, I am in need of some advice. The other night I was trying to connect a sata cable to my Asus P8Z77-V LX mobo and I somehow broke the sata connector off of the mobo. It is a seven pin connector. Can this be repaired, and where can I get sata port, or will I have to send the board off for repair? The board is still working, but only has five working sata ports. Just call me “clumsy”.
Since I don’t rely on my computer for income, I’d very likely soldier on with five working ports rather than fuss with repair. How critical is your need? A local computer/phone repair shop should be able to fix it, or you can replace the whole board. It all depends on the need/want balance.
Maybe this is your opportunity to install an SSD into the M2 port?
Probably what I will do!!! M2 is out and unless our friendly Geek Squad at Best Buy could do the repair, we really have no local repair shop.
I only need three working sata ports, one for Linux Debian, one for W10 and one for W7, the other three was being used by two data drives and dvd player.
I guess I could install a 4 port pci sata raid controller and move my data drives. That would free up two more mobo sata ports. Thanks for your input.
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The practicality of fixing your mobo is going to depend on your skills and what sort of gear you have… MOBO’s tend to be complex, with lots of layers, and closely spaced components, which makes them very easy to damage in really serious ways…
I would not attempt to work on a mobo unless you have really serious soldering and rework skills, along with the professional tools to go with them. That you are asking about it, and where to get the parts, suggests to me that you probably don’t have the needed chops to safely repair the board.
I would recommend going with the add-in card, there are lots of choices and they are cheap… Only downside is most of them won’t let you boot off a drive connected to them, but sounds like this isn’t a big issue for you.
ex-Gooserider
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I’ve done bits and pieces of soldering over the years, and I’m AWFUL at it - will only do it at a pinch and if it’s low risk…
I don’t think I’d EVER attempt this myself, on a motherboard - closest I’ve ever done is solder two wires onto an SBC (Banana Pi) to connect a LiPo battery, and made a bit of a botch of it (it worked, but VERY UGLY).
I once (well twice, actually) blew the pico fuse (ps/2 keyboard circuit) on a motherboard (same mobo) by STUPIDLY connecting something to it while the mobo was powered on!
So - I took it to a repair place nearby (conveniently called "Short Circuit’) and 'cause I knew what part was dodgy - it was like a $20 job for them to solder a new one over the old one…
2nd time it happened, I got an IT colleague (a real geek), at work, using the biomedical engineering labs, to solder a staple (yes!) over the picofuse circuit and NEVER EVER plugged anything into the PS/2 port again! This mobo also had one of those large 5 pin “DIN” keyboard connectors anyway, and I used a serial port and serial mouse (yeah it was that long ago!).
Sage advice, from one of the sages 
:
Thanks for all the advice!!! Will more than likely pull the Linux drive and boot with W10. Have Linux Mint VM running in W7, and that is really all the Linux I need, but I do need my two data drives. Don’t worry, I can hardly see the pins, to even try a repair.
I did the same thing on a a mother board o the same series, it was one of the two near bottom left vertical on the board. Finally gave up and bought a 2 port e-Sata board to give me 7 useful Sata connections.
This computer is my NAS server and has a total of six disks to look after
Martin Coull https://coull.me - the COULL one name study
Now living in Paynesville, Victoria, Australia on the beautiful
Gippsland Lakes.
Time UTC = +10 hours
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Will an addon board give the same data rate as motherboard ports?
I doubt it, but it is about the only option if one is in need of more sata ports. This board will be replaced soon.
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Woohoo! Soon the Aussies will outnumber everyone else here
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My God! What are we gonna do then??? 
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Move to the land of Kangaroos!!!
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There is some spare space… lousy internet and either no water, or a flood.
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Noooo! They kick ass so hard!
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Are you talking about California, the Sacramento area?
Well, I understand it is similar. Only Aust has thousands of square miles of it.
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I do not require a lot of space, surely someone can spare an acre lot.
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That is quite scarce.
Most of our population is urbanised … houses on 1/8 acre or units. In regional areas lots start at 5 acres, you can get power, and maybe water if near town, but no sewage or cable internet, maybe no sealed road. Services are the issue in regional areas, especially medical. You have to travel for everything… we go 15Km just for shop or doctor or church in local small town. Major medical is 150Km to Sydney. That is good. People in the inland areas travel 1000Km for medical, abd 100Km for shops.
Its called the tyranny of distance. Governs everything you do.
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But Starlink would give you low latency , high speed broadband …at least that’s what Elon says.
frank (wicklowham)
Not in Australia. Our satellite broadband is inferior.